Eliazar Parra Cardenas’ new project Backbars doesn’t add any new information to a site. Its aim is to make it easier for your brain to make sense of the information that’s already there. And that’s essentially the name of the game for “information design” junkies like Cardenas.

“The whole point is to make textual information easier to absorb,” Cardenas, 24, told me over Skype from his temporary home in Madrid. “[A well-designed site] should maximize the information that a user can understand — that you can just glance at, or take note of -– without actively thinking.”

Backbars is a small script that only works in Firefox and requires the free Greasemonkey plugin. (GreaseMonkey is a useful tool that lets you customize the way web sites look or act.) It takes numerical data on web pages and turns it into subtle but easily readable bar graphs.

On the social news site Digg [left], for instance, it creates bar charts based on how many times a story has been “dugg.” On the community weblog Metafilter [above], it’s the number of comments users have left on a story. At the social bookmarking site Delicious, it’s the number of times someone has bookmarked the web page. The idea is that these small, unobtrusive graphs allow users to see how popular an item is by simply glancing at it — rather than searching for easy-to-miss numbers and having to recall seventh-grade ratio lessons.

Cardenas says that concept should be integral to the development of text-based sites. When people read online, they don’t read one word after another in a linear way; they “glance around, get the structure of it, jump to the beginning of paragraphs or to the links,” he said, making the well-designed presentation of quantitative data “very powerful.”

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