Interesting graph. One thing I noticed that might make the graph easier to read: there are official post office abbreviations for states. OK for Oklahoma, AK for Alaska, ME for Maine, etc. Most people looking for their state will recognize the two-letter abbreviations easier.
This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. “ME” for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?
There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal “hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else”.
In my experience, many people outside of the states can only really name a few specific states. Often it’s New York, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, and/or Alaska.
I’d wager quite a bit of money that less than 50% of people outside of the US would be able to identify which name in the following list is not one of the 50 states: Navajo, Idaho, Utah, and Montana.
As American politics and decisions have a big influence on what is happening in the world, the chance that someone from outside the US knows something about the US are bigger, way bigger than the other way round. We speak your mother tongue, but you probably don’t speak any of ours…
That said, it would be rather interesting to see Navajo as a state. It would probably located in the Utah/Arizona/New Mexico area. If it existed.
Interesting graph. One thing I noticed that might make the graph easier to read: there are official post office abbreviations for states. OK for Oklahoma, AK for Alaska, ME for Maine, etc. Most people looking for their state will recognize the two-letter abbreviations easier.
This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. “ME” for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?
There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal “hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else”.
People not from the US will prefer names, not some (for most of the world) meaningless abbreviations.
In my experience, many people outside of the states can only really name a few specific states. Often it’s New York, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, and/or Alaska.
I’d wager quite a bit of money that less than 50% of people outside of the US would be able to identify which name in the following list is not one of the 50 states: Navajo, Idaho, Utah, and Montana.
As American politics and decisions have a big influence on what is happening in the world, the chance that someone from outside the US knows something about the US are bigger, way bigger than the other way round. We speak your mother tongue, but you probably don’t speak any of ours…
That said, it would be rather interesting to see Navajo as a state. It would probably located in the Utah/Arizona/New Mexico area. If it existed.
Or just use full names.