More on interactive graphics

So for a while now I’ve been building this cricket visualisation thingy. Basically it’s what I think is a pseudo-innovative way of describing a cricket match, by showing how the game ebbs and flows, and marking off the key events.

Here’s a sample, from the ongoing game between Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders.

As you might appreciate, this is a bit cluttered. One “brilliant” idea I had to declutter this was to create an interactive version, using Plotly and D3.js. It’s the same graphic, but instead of all those annotations appearing, they’ll appear when you hover on those boxes (the boxes are still there). Also, when you hover over the line you can see the score and what happened on that ball.

When I came up with this version two weeks back, I sent it to a few friends. Nobody responded. I checked back with them a few days later. Nobody had seen it. They’d all opened it on their mobile devices, and interactive graphics are ill-defined for mobile!

Because on mobile there’s no concept of “hover”. Even “click” is badly defined because fingers are much fatter than mouse pointers.

And nowadays everyone uses mobile – even in corporate settings. People who spend most time in meetings only have access to their phones while in there, and consume all their information through that.

Yet, you have visualisation “experts” who insist on the joys of tools such as Tableau, or other things that produce nice-looking interactive graphics. People go ga-ga over motion charts (they’re slightly better in that they can communicate more without input from the user).

In my opinion, the lack of use on mobile is the last nail in the coffin of interactive graphics. It is not like they didn’t have their problems already – the biggest problem for me is that it takes too much effort on the part of the user to understand the message that is being sent out. Interactive graphics are also harder to do well, since the users might use them in ways not intended – hovering and clicking on the “wrong” places, making it harder to communicate the message you want to communicate.

As a visualiser, one thing I’m particular about is being in control of the message. As a rule, a good visualisation contains one overarching message, and a good visualisation is one in which the user gets the message as soon as she sees the chart. And in an interactive chart which the user has to control, there is no way for the designer to control the message!

Hopefully this difficulty with seeing interactive charts on mobile will mean that my clients will start demanding them less (at least that’s the direction in which I’ve been educating them all along!). “Controlling the narrative” and “too much work for consumer” might seem like esoteric problems with something, but “can’t be consumed on mobile” is surely a winning argument!