Interactive examples

USA Today launches innovative presidential approval tracker

USA Today recently launched an interactive Flash module visualizing the approval ratings of the last twelve presidents in an innovative and colorful presentation. “Presidential approval tracker” lets users compare approval ratings chronologically, or in comparison to others. Customized pie charts, a scalable time line, and an elegant interface are only a few of the many assets I love about this interactive.

The wealth of data is extremely impressive, from the hundreds of poll statistics to the complementary historical news events explaining the large drops and gains. Most importantly, the data is displayed in a welcoming interface, allowing the user to learn through playing.

I emailed multimedia producers William Couch and Kristen Novak for feedback on this exceptional piece.

William noted that this interactive presented many difficulties, including learning how to program his first scaling time line.

“The biggest challenge of this piece was working on the chart’s performance as it’s processing and converting thousands of data points dynamically. This becomes a considerable strain on the user’s processor and can degrade performance, which I am still working to improve. However, I felt as though the feature was valuable enough to launch the interactive with it despite some of its drawbacks,” he wrote.

Although this piece was built from scratch, Kristen utilized pre-built class libraries to implement certain interactive components.

“By using a class library, we can utilize the benefits of Object Oriented Programming so we can reuse code and speed up our development time (not to mention make our own lives easier). One example of this is the pie chart you get on roll over of each poll point. That is one of the custom classes we have that we can use for a pie chart anywhere we want. The library offers a lot of other shortcuts ranging from utilities to work with dates, strings, shapes to classes for loading different types of content and so on,” she wrote.

Kristen noted that this interactive could (and probably will) become a template and/or custom class to improve turn-around time on similar projects in the future. “Components and classes offer a much more effective – and modular – way to approach building interactive graphics,” she wrote.

Interactive producer Joshua Hatch came up with the idea of comparing approval ratings against other presidents, and wrote on his blog that he had been wanting to build this interactive for more than a year now.

“I’m really pleased with the results, which overlay news events and allow for different ways of comparing the polls. We’ll keep the tracker updated and I’m looking forward to adding more information, like economic indicators and more,” he blogged.

All together, William said that this interactive took a month to build, amidst other assignments. For such a large and compelling project, I would say that was definitely a month well spent!

Congrats William Couch, Kristen Novak, Michelle Price and Joshua Hatch on such a high-quality data visualization project.

[Hat tip to FlowingData for bringing this interactive to my attention.]

Other posts that might interest you:

• USA Today tracks US federal taxes in customizable graphic
• MSNBC interactive editor Vu Nguyen discusses stimulus tracker
• AP Chile earthquake interactive under utilizes navigation

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