KIF—the Kaleidocade Indicators Framework—has proven to be a powerful tool for organizations that want to share with the public large amounts of data, visualize it, and provide sophisticated analytical tools to help people interpret it. But what about those organizations with much less data or the need for a more streamlined, simple approach?
The KIFlite global sample application assembles hundreds of statistics and indicators
KIFlite is a new option for organizations that wish to publish geographically aggregated indicators. It combines the analytic power of KIF with a simplified user interface, making it easy to quickly dive into maps and charts.
KIFlite was originally conceived as a way for KIF to operate on a touch screen. Potential users of KIF may not have the luxury of sitting comfortably at a computer, thinking through questions in detail, and then saving their work and returning to it later. We had to think of a way for KIF to be immediately engaging and easily manipulated without the use of a mouse or keyboard by someone passing a kiosk at a conference or other interactive display. Even though KIFlite has been expanded to work from a regular computer and not necessarily only from a touch screen, that initial focus led us to differentiate KIFlite from the full KIF package in several ways:
- A Single Geographic Level— The full KIF application supports the inclusion of several different geographies in one implementation. Depending on the coverage area of the client’s data, it might be broken up into states/counties/tracts or municipalities/ZIP codes/school districts. The end-user chooses the area and associated data they are interested in. KIFlite analyzes and displays all data at a single geography, simplifying the user experience.
- Live Indicator Selection—In KIF, before performing analysis, a user chooses a subset of indicators relevant to their interests and adds them to their own “indicator collection” before doing any analysis. These can then be saved to a user account and retrieved later. KIFlite makes any indicator available for any of the available analysis tools, but doesn’t save data to a user’s collections.
- User Accounts – Though user accounts are extremely useful in an application where people are likely to want to save their work, the quick in-and-out approach of KIFlite makes user accounts unnecessary.
- Reports—KIFlite’s rapid and temporal style of interaction inherently de-emphasized the need for highly detailed reports. KIFlite offers a smaller range of simplified reports.
KIFlite - Scatter Plot
If you’d like to check out KIFlite, check out our global sample application; it focuses on global socio-economic indicators, ranging from health to freedom of the press worldwide.
We hope that this addition to the KIF family of products will bring the power of Kaleidocade to an even wider audience who deals with large amounts of geographic indicators that need to be interpreted and analyzed quickly and efficiently. For examples of organizations that use KIF already, please visit our KIF clients’ page.
