And The Heat (Map) Is On (Beta)!
As a team of passionate data geeks, y'all know we love geeking out about algorithms. But we don't love data just for data's sake. For us, it's about arming city-makers with the data they need to Get It (walkable, liveable places) DONE. Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to work with a handful of cities and developers across the U.S. as part of our giveaway competition. Each city had their own set of hurdles they were working to overcome to make their walkability projects come to life, from insanely tight budgets to competing community needs. But three needs held true for all city-makers:
SMARTer place data is needed to identify optimal plans and projects
Data must be easy to analyze and understand
Data must tell a clear story about the power of place
We know we got #1 & #2 covered, but in this 140-character world, we know telling concise yet impactful stories is critical. As many of you know, we collect data on 290 built environment features for every block, and while our software aggregates that information into an Index and Profile displays it in a clean bar chart, we know that’s just one part of telling a compelling visual story. We know that visualization and mapping are the other key parts of the story "equation." As a small company, we pride ourselves on being agile and extremely reactive to our customer’s needs. And we're fortunate enough to have a new Technical Product Manager who's not just a math whiz (like literally, she majored in it!) but also loves maps (and has a healthy obsession with a super cool tool called MapBox!). So we combined her amazing skills and used what we learned from our clients, giveaway winners, and some awesome tutorials from MapBox to create an interactive heat map, which we think you'll love!.
Unveiling Our New Interactive Heat Map...
In Beta!
The heat map - still in beta (but no longer a secret!) allows you to visualize the State of Place Index at the block level, and then toggle between the 10 urban design dimensions to see how each block compares to each other. Your strengths and weaknesses on display - and in color - yes, please!
We would love for you to test drive the heat map and give us your feedback on its design and usability. We’ll integrate the heat map functionality into our software in 2018, so stay tuned for more updates throughout the year! Without further ado, take our heat map for a spin by exploring some of our giveaway winner's data (best experienced on a desktop).
Please fill out the info below - it's option but we'd love to know what cool people are into heat maps and visualizations as much as we are! Or just scroll on down and get your heat(map) on immediately!