Simplifying maps to make sense

https://medium.com/@tviit/the-new-york-city-subway-map-redesigned-9a3f776c7627#.32dju0mli

Over the long weekend, I was traveling to NYC for some work and needed to use the subway system for commuting. For non-newyorkers it is a task about what line goes where and how many connections overlap each other.

This is a visualization I came across while reading more about the subways systems. The left hand side shows a simplified version of the original map that is being used by the metro.

There are multiple lines which have been assigned multiple colors.

For example, R,N and  Q lines signify the yellow color and these lines run on several stations. But Q doesn’t go beyond 57th street. That is clearly seen on the redesigned chart on the left.

This chart also shows the junctions and the intersections. On the 42nd street station, all the lines 1,2,3,R,N,Q and S intersect. This can be seen clearly on the redesigned chart, while it takes a bit to decipher that from the original map.

The different thing that they have done is they have visualized multiple lines for each color. Like yellow runs through R,N and Q, they have made 3 separate lines to visualize the yellow R ,N and Q lines as compared to a single line in the original map. These multiple lines makes it easy to track.

On a first glance, the redesigned map looks much simpler, cleaner and neat. Though it has the exact same amount of information as the original map, the new one is simpler to read.

In creating visualizations it is very important to keep in mind a sense of simplicity. For someone who is looking at the visualization for the first times, congested visualizations become difficult to interpret.

References :  https://medium.com/@tviit/the-new-york-city-subway-map-redesigned-9a3f776c7627#.32dju0mli