DATA VISUALIZATION and the PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
One thing I’ve learned from this historic Presidential race is that numbers don’t tell the whole story. Maybe that’s because the numbers aren’t presented in a particularly clear or compelling way. As a self-professed political junkie, I surf the cable news channels and political web sites nightly, looking for daily catnip that informs and entertains. One trend I’ve noticed is that many of the news networks and political web sites have invested heavily in data visualization to attempt to tell the polling and state-by-state Electoral College stories in graphic ways. In my view, they have not succeeded. The most notable example is CNN commentator John King, who has his giant "magic map", comprised of blue, light blue, red, pink and gold states (huh?!) that he manipulates with a tactile touch of a finger (spoofed brilliantly in a recent Saturday Night Live skit). CNN’s attempt at mapping the vote seems to be more about showcasing the technology than effectively telling the story.
During the Presidential debates, CNN featured a "people meter" scrolling across the bottom of the screen, measuring focus group reactions to comments made by the candidates in real time. CNN also showcased a convoluted rating system featuring six pundits awarding and subtracting points based on how the candidates performed throughout the debate. At one debate viewing party I attended, the entire room spent the evening trying to dissect and interpret the charts and graphs on the screen, instead of listening to the candidate’s responses. Most of these graphic delights were available only on the high-def TV feed, filling up the letterbox in the margins of the screen. And that seems to be the current state of affairs, at least in the cable news world. Today’s dynamic data visualization is mostly treated like "eye candy" for the digerati, or as a high-tech differentiation technique in the battle for viewers. The promise is so much greater. At its best, data visualization is more than graphic bells and whistles. It provides a clearer, simpler, more intuitive way to convey complex data, and provides real competitive advantage in communicating with users.
Anyone who has heard the expression "a picture tells a thousand words" can grasp the power and potential of data visualization across an almost infinite number of commercial, creative and educational applications. Starting with Da Vinci and Galileo and early 16th century maps, nautical tables and astronomy charts, man has attempted to use pictures instead of words to tell complex stories. The trick, like with all customer experience work, is to start from the bottom up, and base the information design on how people actually process and consume data. Great strides have been made in cognitive research in recent years to better understand how people process, interpret and respond to visual images. Combining this knowledge with advanced information design techniques, the field of dynamic data visualization can help clients tell data-rich stories, on paper and on screens, in more effective ways.
We all know that raw data rarely equals intelligence. But increasingly, data visualization is helping to turn complicated information into visual intelligence in intuitive ways that enhance communication effectiveness and ultimately, the customer experience. Maybe by the next Presidential election, my favorite media outlets won’t feature a bunch of talking heads, but instead, a series of elegantly designed graphics that tell the story better than any pundit can.