this is totally gonna work…

On Super Tuesday, I forwent attending the usual Seattle Ruby Brigade meeting and stayed at home glued to the radio and TV keeping up on the primary and caucus results across the nation. I love the Public Radio/TV talking heads, but I was really lacking the overall picture. So I warmed up the Internet tubes and started searching for some helpful at-a-glance snapshot of the state of Super Tuesday.

Here then, is an amateur’s critique of the various infographics I tripped across. What I was looking for was something that would tell me:

• Margin of victory for each candidate
• Percentage of precincts reporting
• The number of delegates available
• The number of delegates each candidate won
• Clear indication of races that have finished, and those that have not.
• I want as much information as I can get in a small space
• I don’t want to navigate through data

The New York Times

So let’s start with New York Times. This tabular graphic came from the New York Times front page:

This one came the closest to the goals I was looking for. The Times doesn’t waste any space on images of either the candidates or the states themselves (something a lot of other graphics couldn’t avoid). I get just about everything I’m looking for on my list, except for the delegates.

From the front page, I followed the “Full Coverage” link to this pictorial table which shows the breakdown by state. The conversion of images to black and white for candidates that have dropped out is a nice visual touch. I don’t mind this too much because the table would still be quite readable without them. This table is essentially the same information as the previous one, except that it shows all of the states and has the additional bonus of indicating states whose primaries haven’t happened yet.

And then, of course, we have the ubiquitous geographic map. This view was predominant one across most of these sites. Many sites touted these things as “interactive” which amazes me that it could be considered a possible selling point. I’ll take “informative” over “interactive” any day of the week thank you.

The Washington Post

This little tidbit was at the bottom of each party’s news column on the Washington Post Politics page. I’m not so hot on the geographic map, but the fact that it was placed at the bottom of a text column instead dominating the page (as many of the maps do) earns this a few points.

Next, we turn to the Post’s “Super Map”, which is a glut of hyperactive mouse-oriented popups. It looks promising, but the popup comments came up too easily and weren’t easily dismissed. While this map gives us some notion of the delegates each state has, I can’t tell which candidate got what portion of delegates. Also states that have declared winners don’t show any margin of victory details. This map takes up the entire screen and doesn’t really earn the space it takes up.

At the bottom of the map was a little trend-line chart for the Democrats. Care to guess when Edwards dropped out of the race?

National Public Radio

This is the table from the front page of National Public Radio’s page. This table gives me most of the things I’m looking for with no space wasted on unnecessary graphics. While we get delegate information, the lack of percentages is unfortunate. This is the only tabular display I found that ordered the per-state results in the chronological order in which the polls will close.

This table was a nice compact little sidebar on NPR’s Super Tuesday coverage page. This is probably the best delegate information I found out of any of the sites surveyed here.

CNN

I have to come clean and admit that I simply can’t stand CNN. It’s always on and has so little useful content. The election coverage I’ve seen to-date has some of the glitziest, lowest-density graphics in their live broadcasts of any I’ve seen. The touch displays are merely a cover up for the fact that the content is empty and newscasters cannot improv. However, I have to give CNN credit with this tabular display. Not fantastic, but at least no wasted space on graphics.

However, this table falls short on a number of counts. The biggest problem is the need to paginate through results. Requiring mouse-overs to get popups on a map is one thing, but clicking through a list of data to find what you’re looking for is simply inexcusable. This is a particularly obnoxious example of failing to making the data dense enough.

From the “Full Coverage” link:

I find the stylized map insulting. The northern border of the United States is not a flat. The state borders don’t line up neatly in rows. Not only does this map have the same faults of the others (low data density, too much interaction required), it’s also simply wrong.

USA Today

The USA Today made it’s name in glitzy, over-wrought graphics and typing the URL in the browser bar I fully expected some useless 3D pie-charts and other such non-sense. I was pleasantly surprised to find this box on the front page:

This is a surprisingly informative view. The densely-packed links dispense with state navigation via map. I don’t mind navigation here so much because I can quickly get to any state. I don’t have paginate through results and I don’t have to float over states whose shapes I can’t remember to find them. Instead, clicking on a well-known state abbreviation link in the navigation bar gives you a nice detailed breakdown:

The inclusion of the advertisement in the outlined space of the first graphic works to draw your attention, but is really a turn-off. It’s only because I was giving each site one click that I continued navigating through the site. Normally, I would have left the site for that reason. To be fair, I understand the these sites have to support themselves with advertising. But putting an ad in the middle of a graphic depicting who we pick as our president in one of the most critical times of our history really cheapens the subject being covered.

MSNBC

Sigh…

By now you’ve probably figured out that I think the inclusion of visual geographic information is superfluous. The state images take a third of each state’s space for information. Other than the letter and color, which indicate the candidate and party, this space doesn’t help me. I can tell that the box is about California because it is titled “California” at the top. The inclusion of state images seems like a weak attempt to “spice up” the presentation of the data.

This graphic gives us the usual percentages, including the percentage of precincts reporting, and the total delegates which is helpful. However, since each state apportions delegates differently, we can’t really tell how important a margin of victory is in a particular state. I can’t really harp on MSNBC for this, nobody included that level of detail in the graphic summaries.

Information Design

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Social Commentary, Usability, Web stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.