Welcome another high-end information design visualizer in the form of Virgin Eye, Richard Branson and company’s aggregator-slash-tracker-slash-gallery. It provides sweet eye candy and is functionally simple enough, though I’m not sure why the gallery is there. Its inclusion seems like an afterthought, melded on top of the experience, rather than integrated into it.

Performance-wise, it seems to be chugging along over my high-speed network and isn’t as responsive as I’d like. Perhaps that’s due to initial traffic hits. Otherwise, for a visualizer, it’s not bad, but it’s lack of features and additional views makes it a quick visit.

via Josh Spear

In the world of innovation, the execution is as important as the exercise. If you can’t “sell” the idea with meaningful visualization and functionality, you lose. As part of the AOL Prototyping Team, I learned just how important the “pitch” or execution strategy was to help get support for an idea. One of the last projects I worked on was a blueprint for the future of online news. This included a comprehensive competitive survey, a robust ideation workout and initial visualization exercises. While I didn’t get to see if any of our work will come to fruition (having moved into a new role elsewhere), we stepped into some areas that still haven’t been thoroughly explored.

During the survey phase, we occasionally stumbled across efforts that warranted merit, but not many that were truly pushing the online news experience into the future. AOL itself made some inroads with its dynamic, blog-like approach. USA Today went two-point-oh with a strong emphasis on community (a la Digg), MSNBC has taken some progressive steps and UK’s Times has enriched their visual and user experiences for the better. All said, the jury is still out. Perhaps it hasn’t even been selected yet. Though not necessarily revolutionizing the news experience, but iteratively improving the user experience, the NY Times still reigns champ overall with its powerhouse user base and award-winning infographics.

So the question is where will this sector be in 4 or 5 years? Will we use news in the same way? Will it be highly portable and device-scalable? Will local coverage foster micro-communities? Will we have more immediate and personal relationships with the way we share news? Most likely.

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Khoi Vinh and the wizards of the Internets up in the Big City El Norte have put together a slick web-zine (is there a new term yet?) called T Magazine. Responsive Flash coupled with large format graphics and a simple layout make for a clean little package. My only peeve would be that some of the type is a bit small and too light to read for older eyes. Ah, what’s function when you’ve got such sweet form?