Infographics have become a must have for many companies trying to share data, a way to make statistics more shareable and accessible. Whether static or animated, they’re intended to take a few stats and frame them more appealingly in the hopes that readers will retweet, re-post, and link to them. Often, they succeed at that through charm and good design – but the information they carry often doesn’t spread quite as fast.
Many are remembered and shared for their artistic beauty rather than for the quality of their content. Some of my favorite infographics in the past year were memorable because they were triumphs of design that transformed a little slice of reality into a work of art. Beautiful – but not memorable beyond that.
The graphic itself sometimes even obfuscates data. This graphic, recognized on Fast Company’s Infographic of the Day blog, has a lot of information and attractive formatting, but sometimes gets in its own way. Take a look at one of its “6 social indicators of marital health and well-being.”
It looks beautiful and contains interesting information that can be drawn out, but I wonder if the information might have been easier to show in a table or a simple bar graph – requiring the casual reader to read a polar area diagram feels as if the style ended up distracting from the substance.
A graphic is inherently going to require simplifying data, because there’s only so much information that it can convey. What if, however, more organizations gave everyone access to graphical representations of their data, and let people parse it on their own? Their audiences could engage with the data, play around with it, and remember to a much greater extent what they’d learned.
Some successful and long-lived infographics/data analysis projects like Gapminder and Cabspotting decided to make their datasets publicly available from the beginning and earned attention and engagement as a result. Two weeks ago the New York Times highlighted Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit that displays data on dozens of measures of national well-being, which has had a video on GDP development that’s been viewed more than 4 million times. Their website allows visitors to play with the data on their own, comparing and contrasting whatever they like and to figure out its effects independently. Cabspotting, a project to track San Francisco cabs over time, also welcomes artists and researchers who want to create their own projects –some more art-focused, some less – out of that data.
Eyebeam and Google’s Visualize Your Taxes challenge is another example, presenting six ways to look at the taxes you pay and where they go in the government, then allowing you to manipulate the data in various ways, from adjusting which programs you pay for to calculating how your tax bill would change if you took Fridays off. It makes tax data no longer abstract in a way that adjusts for each viewer’s particular interests, and lets them compare their opinions with others’ decisions.
Naturally, not all data works well as part of a public database, and sometimes the best option is to create a static infographic. What Gapminder, Cabspotting, and others show, however, that it’s not enough to have slick packaging on a statistic or piece of data to make it stick. What people care about is the substance, something that will grab their attention for more than a moment in their online travels. An effective graphic, whether static or interactive, has to tell a story that’s compelling enough to make readers think beyond the data itself to its implications, and it has to be accessible enough that they can share it with friends without having to explain it at length.
What do you think? Do you typically remember the content of an infographic better than you would if you read the pure data? Does interactivity make readers significantly more likely to remember an infographic – or is it not worth the expense of the added features?
Images thanks to Fast Company, PromotionalCodes.org.uk, Data Viz Challenge.