How HERE Technologies visualizes the world’s movement in real time

The challenge

HERE Technologies provides the location data that helps cars navigate, packages arrive on time, and emergency services coordinate responses. The tricky part is making the invisible feel real to people who’ve never thought about what’s happening behind the scenes when they navigate a certain route or receive a parcel at their door.

Making complex systems understandable

For HERE’s communication team, data visualization became the bridge between technical infrastructure and human understanding. It helped them solve multiple problems at once:

• making an often-invisible technology feel real for different audiences, like journalists, customers, and the broader public
• demonstrating the real-world impact of HERE’s solutions through location data storytelling
• creating culturally relevant or newsworthy stories that get cited by media
• creating on-brand visuals without a long production cycle

“It’s really about using the enterprise-grade data that our products draw from, and turning that into a digestible form, that is compliant and runs online reliably. That’s the trick,” says Martin.

“Flourish is a great enabler for that. We could do it in other ways, but we choose Flourish because it’s easy, it’s fast, and they have great customer support.”

Turning live moments into something you can see

The team now uses Flourish across a wide range of projects, from maps and scatter plots to interactive SVGs, stories, scrollytelling experiences, and live dashboards. Its biggest focus is live location storytelling.

Here’s a look at traffic surrounding US pro football stadiums, an interactive visualization that lets readers or journalists explore their local area. This slider also allows you to compare congestion before and after a game day.

HERE’s traffic data updates every five minutes, making Flourish’s live CSV refresh capabilities a perfect fit. It helped the team build reusable templates connected directly to live feeds.

“We have the whole thing templatized, so we’re not building any of that from scratch anymore. That’s been a great time saver,” says Martin.

Projects that once required agencies or external developers can now be created internally in a matter of hours. That speed fundamentally changed how the communications team operates.

“Now we’re in a place where, if we receive a media request or want to pitch a story on a specific location – let’s say there’s an event happening, or something extraordinary affecting traffic data – we’re able to create the story within a day, leveraging HERE maps and data with visualizations from Flourish,” explains Christo Mitov, Communications Manager at HERE.

Scaling live storytelling for the Paris Games

The same approach becomes even more powerful when the complexity and scale increase. HERE built a live traffic dashboard covering 35 locations simultaneously, combining both real-time and historical traffic data into a single interactive experience.

Building the project was challenging. The team needed significant data integration and processing capabilities, and had a tight publishing window. Yet they shipped the project on time.

The dashboard was used externally by media outlets, and also internally across HERE offices and at partner days. Similar dashboards have been used at major industry events, including CES and logistics conferences. “It worked on both big and small screens,” Christo says.

This interactive map was used to show disruptions for drivers during the Paris Games, highlighting key areas that could be explored in more depth.

Mapping the bigger picture of EV readiness

But not every story is about reacting to a moment. Another standout project for the team is the HERE-SBD EV Index, a large-scale annual benchmark and visualization project designed to compare how ready different countries are for electric-vehicle adoption.

“We use HERE’s own charge point data as the foundation, complemented by national and public authority sources and automotive market data. Bringing it all together – and turning it into clear visuals – gives you a broad picture of global EV readiness,” says Christo.

The project combined interactive scatter plots, story sequencing, and layered exploration allowing users to move from high-level insights into deeper regional detail without overwhelming them.

The outcome:

• Public audiences could explore global EV adoption and charging trends visually rather than through static reports
• Media outlets could embed and publish the visualizations directly
• Automotive and Enterprise customers could explore charging infrastructure coverage

Why interactivity still matters in the AI era

As generative AI makes it easier to create visuals quickly, HERE sees a growing difference between producing charts and building reliable, scalable interactive experiences.

“Thanks to AI, almost anything can now be built quickly, at least to a certain level, and that’s wonderful,” Martin says. “Building something is one thing. Running it reliably in an enterprise environment is another. The real challenge is trust in the data, governance, and delivering a consistent experience every time.”

For HERE, interactivity and stability matter just as much as speed. “For example, Flourish’s live CSV feature is straightforward to use, and the backend is rock-solid,” Christo explains.

That reliability has made Flourish a central part of the communications workflow rather than an occasional creative tool. The broader value is not simply faster chart production, but the ability to turn complex data into accessible, interactive experiences that help people understand the context behind real-world events.