With Stephen Few’s Visual BI workshop around the corner in Sydney and Melbourne, the USA election provided a host of graphs and charts to analyse against Few’s data visualisation principles.
Just how well did all those images communicate what you wanted to know? Following are some interesting examples of US Election visual BI.
The NY Times decided to use a tree map to plot scenarios. They also had a line graph trending the results as they came in – fantastic ways to show complicated scenarios:
http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenarios
Visual.ly went with the expected Infographic – lots of interesting stats:
http://visual.ly/election-2012-voter-registration
CNN had bar/bullet, geographical heat map and stacked 100% bar graphs – a more standard way to view data:
http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/results/main
Facebook went with the histogram and mapped users who clicked on an Election Day prompt to share with friends – clever – data and self- promotion:
http://www.facebookstories.com/vote
SMH ran a visualisation map reflecting the number of electoral votes (1 square, 1 vote) vs the classical geographic map – a different visual for the map of America:
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/9ca2z
Google went for the geographical heat map, with a bar chart of sorts for summary. Have a look at the trends and insights tabs:
http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results
Which do you like? What works for you?
Some of the Consulting team at Altis: Ash, Bhumik and Guillaume