I’ve always loved heat maps, so it thrills me that we are making them readily available to business users in the next version of our product, Visual Fusion 4.5 (due out in early November). One of the core benefits of Visual Fusion is helping users understand complex information quickly, at a glance, and heat maps are a perfect fit for this mission.
We’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and with the 4.0 release of Visual Fusion it became pretty straight forward for anyone to accomplish via our SDK (note to developers out there, Visual Fusion is highly extensible and allows you to be uber-creative in meeting the unique needs of your organization). Once we pulled the trigger on setting it up for a couple of demos, it was only a few more steps to productize the capability for our next release.
In typical IDV fashion, our productization has focused on empowering the business user. Visual Fusion heat maps can be augmented with front-end filters to allow the end user to control the intensity and size of the heat produced by individual points; thus, the end user can craft a visualization that makes the most sense for their needs. Additionally, power users can setup heat maps via our Composer tool. This means heat maps can be created code free! Here’s an early mock up of the user interface for setting up heat maps in Visual Fusion Composer:
Got a new Excel file or KML file of points that you want to heat-mapify? Do you have 5 minutes to make this happen? That’s all the time you need to go from raw data to new Visual Fusion app (or, if you prefer, to add the data to an existing app) to your custom heat map! And of course with the enterprise mashup nature of Visual Fusion, you can integrate the heat map with the rest of your organizational data and even cloud content... all in a Silverlight front-end on top of Bing Maps. This self-service stuff is awesome! Quick tangent: we have even more capabilities coming out in the next several months along this self-service path… things that I would classify as ground shaking… but more on that at another time. Back to heat maps!
Our UX Lead John Nelson, has blogged on different issues around heat mapping in his customary entertaining and informational style here. Specific topics he’s covered so far are:
I have no problem promising that you’ll enjoy his posts. His stuff is always a great read. He’s also created a rich palette of style options for the heat map visualizations. Here are a few of them:
As mentioned, we’ve incorporated heat maps into some of our demos, including our public facing demo app that can be found here. Yes, right now you can go out and play around with a US population heat map, dialing up or down the intensity of the heat and/or how much it spreads out. Combining that with the other feeds and tools, like vertical extrusion, brings even more fun!
Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions. Whether your interest is heat maps, world-class business user experience, enterprise mashups in SharePoint, interactive maps, executive dashboards, getting GIS content out to the larger organization, location intelligence, geospatial intelligence, data visualization, data integration in the context of location or time, rapid application development, building custom applications on a strong product base, composite applications, common operational pictures, or writing code to extend a product that does all these things, we’d love to talk to you.
Scott Caulk / Director of Product Management / IDV Solutions /
scott.caulk@idvsolutions.com
