Introducing the “Mapmakers” series

Over the years, we’ve rolled out some really fantastic features within Kumu to help people glean insights from maps of systems and networks. A brief hall of fame:

• Decorate — Change visual appearance of items (color, size, pattern, shadow, image, etc.).
• Filter — Temporarily show or hide items.
• Showcase — Make certain items translucent, fading them subtly into the background.
• Focus — Focus on a single element, hiding everything else. Then, expand outward to reveal more elements and connections, step-by-step.
• Cluster — Connect elements automatically, based on the information in their fields.
• Imported views — Import rules from another view, so that you don’t have to tediously re-create them
• Controls — Customize the way people interact with your map.
• Layouts — Change the way Kumu positions your elements.

With so many options, it’s hard to know which ones will add value to a map! And, once you get comfortable with a certain group of features, it’s easy to make changes just because you can—not necessarily because you should.

To compound the problem, all maps are not created equal—the feature that brings clarity and beauty to one map is often the same feature that turns another map into a messy, confusing, intimidating hairball of data.

To help solve this problem, we’re starting a new series on our blog called Mapmakers. In each article in the series, we’ll look at one or two Kumu maps submitted by our users, and write about which features are working, and which aren’t.

We’ll make changes to those maps, working our way toward deeper insight by applying (or intentionally not applying) different Kumu features. At the end of each post, we’ll show before-and-after screenshots of the map, and you can decide whether or not we were successful!

In the first post in this series, we reviewed a map created by the Digital Life Collective.

Want to submit your map for review? Send it to mapmakers@kumu.io!

Thanks to Steve Schoger, Adam Wathan, and their Refactoring UI series for the inspiration. If you’re a developer and/or designer, you should definitely check out their work!