The World Wildlife Foundation has a new site where you can track a few pygmy elephants fitted with satellite collars.  As fun as that sounds, poor usability makes it worse than a school project.

First, it’s all wrapped in a crappy Flash interface.  You have to click through five screens to get to the tracking part, and you can’t control how the tracking data is displayed.  The tracking map animates the elephant’s locations each week, but without coordinates or even a distance scale.  We don’t even know if this position is a snapshot at some time during the week or an average.  It’s clear that this project wasn’t intended for repeat viewers or serious researchers.  It might be intended for children and school demonstrations, but then why is it so ugly and boring?  A much better project would have been syndication of the data, so interesting representations could be made by anyone.  And it probably would have been cheaper for the WWF than paying someone to do this.

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