Vizify: A Beautifully Designed ‘Graphical Bio’
I am completely in awe of the new Vizify app, which is a really well-designed ‘graphical bio’ app, drawing upon information in LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook, and additional information from the user.
Vizifydoesn’t introduce any brand-new user experience trick. Instead, the designers brought together some of the best design thinking to what might otherwise be a fairly boring listing of dates, jobs, cities, and tweets (I mean, think about how LinkedIn presents a profile).
Feast your eyes.
Here’s my profile page:
Note that all the nodes in the graph are selectable, and clicking on them opens the respective section of the multipart bio.
I really dig the Career history, which is laid out as columns in a vertical timeline. It’s so cool that I decided to add some quirky jobs back at the beginning of time (yes, I helped debug fire back in the stone age).
The Locations page is an animated sequence of all the places the user has called home:
The single most interesting element of the multi-part bio is the Words tableau, which is something I can imagine revisiting for people over time, since it presents a great way to check out what they are amusing themselves with. (I actually think this suggests another product, which I will pitch to the Vizify folks.)
The editing interface is straightforward (although I had a few glitches where entries weren’t saved, but then reappeared, so I had to enter some information multiple times. The import from Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter just worked. But I would have liked that updates of my work history to have reflected back into Linkedin, which they do not.
However, this comments really are tiny, tiny quibbles about a gorgeous and easy to use tool. Vizify is the tool that About.me should have been.
I am predicting an immediate acquisition, because it’s just too great.
It appears that Vizify will be freemium, with some pro features the company will charge for. I know that I would pay for a widget to put on my blog based on the profile information.
