Interactive examples

CNN launches interactive visualization of Iraq and Afghanistan casualties

This post is also available in: Spanish

Last week I stumbled across the CNN interactive “Home and Away: Iraq and Afghanistan War Casualties,” and I was impressed at their ability to parse the immense amount of data into an aesthetically-pleasing and personal presentation. I am always interested to see how organizations depict this issue since there have been several versions over the years, such as The New York Times’ “Faces of the Dead,” and USA Today’s “Deaths in Iraq: A look at the American lives lost.”

According to a recent press release, the project was a “cross-divisional effort between the CNN Library and CNN.com, a team of researchers, producers, designers, user-experience specialists and developers” who worked from two separate lists of the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I really like their design decision to present the spatial information of where the victims were from as well as where they died in two parallel maps. Visualizing that connection made the information much more personal. Users can browse the overall data either by map or table before zooming in to learn more about a specific person on their personal profile page where users can leave personal messages and memories of the person via iReport.

Complementary data visualizations are provided along the bottom of the interface to show basic trends in the data of age, location, and date of death. This additional navigation was appreciated because I immediately wanted to click on those who were the same age as me, or were from areas near my hometown. I think it’s fairly safe to say that enabling users to personalize this data to make it relevant for them greatly enhances their experience with the presentation.

While I understand the need to separate the casualties in Iraq from those in Afghanistan, I wish there had been more of an overlap in the data to show comparisons between the two. Besides the basic fact that we have been in Iraq longer than Afghanistan, are there any other contributing factors as to why 3,000 more combats have died in Iraq?

Also, for those areas where there were an extraordinarily large number of deaths, such as the Anbar province in Iraq, it would have been nice to have a question mark that users could click to learn more about the incident with links to archived articles.

This interactive definitely fits Ben Shneiderman’s Visual Information-Seeking Mantra of “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.” However, what about his seven tasks of a good visualization?

• Overview: Gain an overview of the entire collection.
• Zoom: Zoom in on items of interest.
• Filter: filter out uninteresting items.
• Details-on-demand: Select an item or group and get details when needed.
• Relate: View relationships among items.
• History: Keep a history of actions to support undo, replay, and progressive refinement.
• Extract: Allow extraction of sub-collections and of the query parameters.

While this interactive does the first four tasks extremely well, I would argue that the last three – relate, history, and extract – would have improved this interactive. Granted, the deeplinks to the individual pages provides an easy take-away for users to share, but what about extracting the data itself?

According to a “Behind the Scenes” post on the project, numerous people were involved in the production. Kudos to everyone involved and to CNN for investing the time and effort to produce this large-scale multimedia site.

Editorial: Manav Tanneeru and Douglas Wood
User experience: Toni Pashley
Flash programming: Ken Uzquiano
Web development: Steve Breeser, Steve Brunton, Miguel Garcia and Mark Walker
Design: Katherine Chase
iReport: Katie Hawkins-Gaar and Lila King
iReport Developers: Kyle Rogers and Pete Bethany
CNN Library: Lizzie Jury, Lindsey Knight, Julie In, Tom Rabeno, Sarah C. Smith, Caitlin Stark, Lisa Tinsley and Kimberly Wine
Public Relations and Marketing: Erica Puntel and Christina Blaisdell
Project managers: Melissa Miske and Peter van der Reyden

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HT: Richard Koci Hernandez

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• TNS visualizes international mobile usage data in “Mobile Life”
• Move over Dipity! AVE, a new interactive timeline editor to put on your radar
• Behind the scenes of Aftenposten’s Wikileaks visualization

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