It has come to my attention that the tweets are out of the bag about the new interactive admissions map on the IMA dashboard. The map is a mashup of our admissions data using the Google Maps API and a zip code demographics resource called ZIPskinny. I thought that I would take some time today to discuss the art and science of colormap selection that went into developing this visualization.
For those of you who are regular blog readers, you’ll probably remember a post from earlier this year where we talked a little bit about user personas and how we use them at the IMA to try and improve the ways we produce web content. In that post, we asked for help in taking a survey that would refresh the information we have about our online audience. I promised that we’d share results with you on how things went and what we’re learning. Never one to shirk on a promise, here are some of the results on that survey… some pretty interesting bits in here!
You can find a lot more graphs from the survey results in the rest of this post, but I thought it would be interested to just pull out a few interesting stats for you up front.
We’ll be contacting the lucky winner of the iPod touch this week and sending out the love to them! Thanks to everyone for helping us with the survey! We’ll be back in touch as we put together a new set of user personas to use for some upcoming web work.
In the mean time, enjoy sifting through our data for us. If you see anything interesting here, be sure to be one of those 49% who do comment on blogs, and Let Us Know! We’re happy to answer any questions you ask!
When I was a junior in high school we got the internet at home . Every night while watching tv, I would check my email. After 5 minutes of whistling and whining while our PC attempted a dial-up connection, I would hear the computer exclaim “You’ve Got Mail!” WOW! Email is amazing I remember thinking. It was so fun and new that even SPAM email was okay because I like to hear the computer was greet me in such an enthusiastic way. Just knowing that there was something waiting for me in the inbox made me happy.
Email has certainly evolved in the last 10 years. I now receive upwards of 100 emails a day. With that many messages streaming into my inbox morning, noon and night, I no longer have the same tolerance for junk mail that I once did. I don’t have time to sort through SPAM. I don’t even have time to read eNewsletters that I have signed up for. I just can’t spend my time sorting through long eNewsletters looking for information that might interest me.I’m not saying that eNewsletters are useless. I’m pretty sure that I’d read them if they interested me, but they typically don’t…not even from organizations that I adore. Instead, I think that marketers, like myself, need to attempt to engage audiences through email in more unique and perhaps, direct ways.
In recent months, the IMA has tackled how to make our eNews more interesting, exciting, and interactive. We’ve included more imagery, more links to the Web sites, more calls to action, and more videos. We want our subscribers to look forward to receiving IMA eNews. We want subscribers to feel the same excitement at seeing an email from the IMA that I felt years ago when I heard the phrase “You’ve Got Mail.” Read the rest of this entry »
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