World maps tend to be wide (horizontal, landscape), whereas mobile phone screens tend to be tall (vertical, portrait). This makes world maps small and hard to see on phones: a problem when you’re trying to present data via a thematic world map (e.g. a choropleth map) on a web page, especially if you’re trying to show data on smaller countries. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung recently did a user study to test the efficacy of two map designs—one that splits continents up and portrays them in different scales to make them more legible on vertical screens, the other a hemispheric bubble map. The results were published in The Cartographic Journal; lead author Jonas Oesch provides a summary in this blog post. [Ralph Straumann]
