Interactive examples

USA Today’s "Campaign finance tracker" is overwhelming at first, but stick with it

Today, USA Today launched a huge interactive enabling users to track the flow of campaign contributions by state, amount, month and sector in relation to the parties, the candidates and/or the independent groups. Confused already? You’re probably not the only one.

I was excited to explore this interactive because 1) I have become some what of a data nerd and 2) UNC alumna Kristen Novak was one of the producers. When I first pulled up the piece, I was underwhelmed at the intro screen. Assuming there were no directions, I blindly continued on into the piece. Looking at it a second time, I now realize that all of the directions are below, jumbled between the related links on the left and the ads on the right. With so much blank space on the intro screen, I would have liked to see a brief intro for the tech-savvy inside the piece, and then the more hand-holding directions (Click the blue button in the upper left corner …) down below.

After giving my undivided attention to this piece, I am extremely happy that I dedicated the time to it. There is a lot of amazing data in there and I enjoyed isolating certain fields, and then combining them with others to see the result. It was worth the time, but I wish there wasn’t that learning curve. One key factor in a successful interactive is the information architecture. Is the interface easy to learn, and almost effortless? The answer might be murky for this one, depending on who you ask.

I think one thing that would have helped is to give certain pieces more hierarchy. It’s a shame that the header treatment takes up almost half of the graphic, leaving, what, 300 pixels for a map of the U.S. and three graphs? For example, if I wanted to deal strictly with the map, it would have been nice if it became more prominent by enlarging and moving the other graphs to the side.

Sadly, it took me a minute to realize that when I filtered one graph, it changed all of the other data accordingly. This is a great, and highly impressive, feature, and I think the animation of the numbers and graph elements helps. But, it’s hard enough for a user to compare two things together, much less five at the same time. When everything changes with each click, a user has to start over from the beginning to learn the significance of the new data, which might be exhausting for some.

I want to commend the producers (and OpenSecrets.org) for processing all of this data and getting it into chewable bites for users. The different weights of fonts and placement of content gives the overall piece a clean, organized feel. Although some of the numbers are small, they are all legible, which is very impressive.

There’s a whole lot of great things happening in this interactive, as long as you dedicate the time to spend with it. Did I learn a lot in this graphic? Yes. Would I have learned more if the data was presented in a different fashion, maybe helping to draw some parallels for me so I didn’t have to work so hard for my “discoveries”? The jury is still out on that one …

Other posts that might interest you:

• USA Today launches innovative presidential approval tracker
• AP political interactive displays great data visualization and video help feature
• AP “Bailout Tracker” visualizes data, but not effectively

© 19 September 2008 Innovative Interactivity (II).