Visualizing
Climb Steepness
Climbers care about surprise roofs, slabby boulder problems, and much in between.
A easy-to-eyeball index of climb steepness would be nice for many climbers.
Aside from a climb's rating,
there's little that affects your experience more than a climb's steepness.
I can't climb slab
and It's too steep
are common refrains.
The goal is to convey the impression of steepness within a single climb and between climbs.
- Convey steepness variation within a climb
- Differentiate between similar climbs
- Differentiate between vastly different climbs
- Be eyeball-able
- Avoid color dependence; it can clash with color schemes or be difficult for users with color vision issues
- requiring minimal education A bit of mandatory initial education is okay, but for a faimiliar user, the message should be obvious. Topographic Maps and Station Models are a excellent examples; without training they look like chaos but once you understand a few simple rules they're effective tools.
For testing, we'll use a diverse selection of well-known climbs:
Connected Lines
pros
- looks like a cross-section of a wall
- can be a near-perfect match for vertical climbs
This fails for steep climbs. The awkward rough edge is that it's too similar to the profile of a wall. For a vertical climb, it will look just like and match the cross-section of a wall. However, for a traverse, it AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Lines
It's not immediately obvious which side of the line you're climbing on.
Semicircles
issues
- This visualization starts to fail on climbs that are overwhelmingly steep.
- The more segments that are used, the less obvious the patterns are
- This is not easy to draw by hand
Bursts
The idea here was to be a bit more compact and produce a predictable size.
Obvious issues revolved around segments similar levels of steepness; They overlap and hide each other. It's also hard to see context within a diagram. This visualization fail entirely when there are multiple small to medium segments defined.
Burst (with opacity and ring)
Adding a ring at the outside edge, and making the rays of the "burst" opaque can help show context.
This offers almost-negligible improvment.
burst (adding pointers)
burst (pointers to ticks)
burst (tracking overhang)
this is far too busy.
burst (at the edge)
this isn't a particularly effective visualization, but its biggest failure is that it abandones any information about the sequence of a climb. The takeaway here was that sequence must be preserved.
Target
Target (with rings)
the downside here
- the wasted space on the bottom half of the circle. could be fixed by cropping out the bottom of the circle
- the center of the circle is very subtle, and the edges are exaggerated. this is a particular issue for climbs that start with a short segment
- awkward to draw by hand
Shaded Bar
color
somewhat similar to hillshade
topo equivalent?
could this exist?
drawbacks and benefits this is hard to create accurately, but very easy to consume as a compairson between many climbs on a page.