Tag Archives: Google Docs

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Urban Usability – How walkable is your city?

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Cleveland skyline from the Superior Viaduct I have a little project called Localographer, which you can use to create heat maps and find a house or apartment near your workplace, friends and relatives, or other place you’d like to be.  When I showed it to my brother he tried mapping out places in Boston and ran into a limitation – the interface doesn’t show you various transit options and it doesn’t make it easy to figure out the real cost and benefits of living in different places.

If you move to the suburbs, you might be able to commute by car but living by a train stop can be cheaper and easier.  In some neighborhoods you can get 10 different kinds of food in a 10 minute walk, in others you need to get in your car and drive a quarter mile to get anything to eat at all.

Adding features like this to Localographer means solving two problems – data and user interface.  I don’t have access to restaurant locations, transit stops, etc. and that sort of data can be expensive to get from commercial sources.  I could go the wiki route but that would require building an interface for users to contribute data and finding ways to make the data more reliable.

So in the mean time, if you want to get an idea of how walkable a potential neighborhood might be, take a look at Walk Score.  It’s a very cool site which has some of the features I’ve been meaning to add to Localographer – you can get a score for how livable the area around any address might be.

For example, my current neighborhood in California has a score of 74 out of 100.   Our house in Shaker Heights scores 62 out of 100.  Because any excuse is a good excuse to use a spreadsheet and a graph, I’ve plotted out the walkability of all the places I’ve lived using a Google Docs spreadsheet and the Interactive Time Series Gadget.  I wrote earlier about how you can embed any Google Doc or Spreadsheet into a blog post but Gadgets are even easier – just click the “Publish” button on the gadget and paste the Javascript code in the raw HTML view of your blogging software.

There are some issues with Walk Score, of course – for example Naples, Florida scores very high, but when I lived there I really missed having access to a car.  Most of the restaurants and shops along 5th Street and Tamiami Trail were out of my internship-funded price range.  I used to bike some distance to get to The Clock, a cheap diner.

All of this discussion is pointing toward a much larger question that I have been thinking about for a long time – I know how to study the usability of web sites and other software, but I wonder if anyone does usability studies of urban planning?  I’ve seen traffic flow studies and I know building codes have some basis in ergonomics and accessibility, but does anyone do observational studies of how people interact with different urban environments to figure out what works and what doesn’t?  Is there a Fitt’s Law of where to locate grocery stores compared to condos?

Embedding Google Docs and Spreadsheets into your Blog Posts

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I just wrote a post about buying a new camera, and because I want to compare specs on several different cameras and lenses, I’m going to need a spreadsheet.  Luckily there are some great online spreadsheet programs to chose from.  I’m going to use this as an opportunity to explore how to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets in blog posts.

Before you get started I’m assuming you already have a Google Docs spreadsheet ready to go.

1.  You can always just link to the document. By default your docs will be private so you’ll need to make them available to your readers.  To do so you’ll need to either go to the Share tab and check “Anyone can view this document WITHOUT LOGGING IN at:” or go to the Publish tab and publish the doc. Either way you’ll get regular URL to post, like this one:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ&hl=en

Links aren’t very exciting though, so how can you embed into a post instead?

2.  You can embed the content into the post.  If you’re wondering how to do it in WordPress, one solution I’ve come across is the Inline Google Docs plugin at Broken Watch.  This plugin gets the actual text/html of the spreadsheet and places it inline in your post.  So if you have a wide blog template, or a spreadsheet with relatively few columns, it should blend right in.  On the other hand, there’s no editing or other fun.

Here’s an example of what the output looks like:

NOTE: I had to disable this, it was throwing errors once I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. You mileage may vary.

3.  You can put the doc directly in the page with an iframe. This works really, really well with Google Presentations but is a bit trickier with a doc and even less optimal with a spreadsheet. You’ll get the best-looking results if you publish the document and use the published URL in the iframe. On the other hand if you use the shared URL collaborators should be able to make changes right in your blog post.

You’ll want to create some code like this:

<iframe src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ” width=”500″ height=”400″></iframe>

Make sure you put the code in the “HTML” editing mode of WordPress rather than “Visual” mode.  As a result you can see some of the info I’ve gathered about possible camera / lens combinations in the spreadsheet below.

The main issue here is the relatively small iframe window size. If you use a wider blog template this technique might work really well.

Why bother? Spreadsheets aren’t the most exciting thing in the world for most people, but play around with all the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets and you’ll see why this can be pretty cool.  You can embed questionnaires and surveys, cool charts and graphs with Gadgets, and anything else you can think of.