How to make interactive data visualisation truly compelling and engaging.
Data visualisation is everywhere on the internet. It’s used to sell products, tell stories and engage viewers and it’s popularity seems to be growing every single year. In recent years, though, simply visualising data has arguably become outdated. Data scientists and journalists are now feeling the need to create visual representations of data that audiences can interact and engage with.
The issue with this? It’s difficult to get right. Not only can it be tough knowing exactly how to present your data in a way that’s truly compelling, making it interactive in a way that engages the viewer can be particularly difficult.
So, we’ve put together this guide on visually presenting your data in a way that inspires your audience.
Visual design is everything
Putting your data into a chart or graph of some description is one thing. Making that visualisation visually compelling is another entirely. Here are some aspects of visual design that you should consider:
- Data layout – does your data best suit being made into a chart, graph, infographic, or a combination of all of these? It’s a good idea to keep the way in which you display your data varied, as this is more likely to keep the viewer engaged for longer.
- Colour – how are you going to visually distinguish different types of data from one another?
- Proportion – if you’re dealing with multiple sets of data, weigh up the importance of each one and rank them. This should be reflected in the design of your data visualisation, with the most important data taking precedence.
- Theme – ensure your interactive data visualisation has a consistent, strong visual design theme running throughout.
- Prototype and seek feedback – getting as much feedback as possible on prototype versions of your data visualisation is essential to ironing out any errors or flaws that may not have been noticed during the first draft stage.
Looking for more data visualisation design tips? Jacob Koshy of Promtcloud has laid out their top 8 principles for effective data visualisation design.
Find the right interactive data visualisation tool
So, you know what your data visualisation should look like, but how do you make it a reality? You need to find a tool that fits your requirements. While there are dozens of different tools available on the market, we’ve narrowed it down to three of our favourites:
- Infogram – a great platform for creating quick, simple infographic-style data visualisations.
- DVWare Data Visualisation – LamasaTech’s own comprehensive data visualisation tool that allows you to create accessible, interactive visual representations of your data that you can access on any browser-enabled device.
- Tableu – a JavaScript-based data visualisation tool with a wide variety of charts and maps.
Creating interactive data visualisations that are truly compelling can be a challenging task, but the right software can make the process so much easier.
Engage the viewer
Now that you’ve decided on the tools you’ll use to visualise your data, you can focus on making it interactive. One great way to do this is to give the user the opportunity to interact with and manipulate the data on screen. Does your data, for example, track trends over a 20-year period? Give users the option to look at individual years or time frames. If you’re trying to communicate a long, complicated data set, it might be a good idea to make it searchable or let the user select from categories.
Another great way to make your data visualisation more engaging is to make it responsive to the user’s actions. The Internet of Things – A Primer uses this to great effect. The data they are representing is complex and would risk being difficult to understand were it not so expertly visualised and interactive. Graphics and diagrams animate and expand when clicked and moused over, lending a feeling of depth and interactivity to the way in which the data is represented. This simultaneously makes the data more digestible and easier to navigate.
Use it to help tell stories
You can usually tell the difference between data visualisation that’s been inserted into an article simply to bulk up the page and make it a little more visually appealing, and data visualisation that has been actively woven into the fabric of a story. The best kind of interactive data visualisation is the kind that adds an extra level of depth to a story that’s being told.
Take, for example, The Guardian’s reporting on the NSA files. This was an enormously complex story, and they knew it. Presenting readers with thousands upon thousands of words would have been a surefire way to lose almost everyone’s attention. That’s why interactive data visualisation was employed.
Not only does this data visualisation add a huge amount of visual appeal to The Guardian’s reporting, it serves as a way to tell a compelling story far more easily than conventional methods.
Some inspiration
Looking for some great examples of interactive data visualisation to inspire you? Here are some of our favourite examples from across the internet:
Infogram – World Cup 2018
Infogram do some incredible work making data visualisation easy to create and share. This example of interactive data visualisation takes you through all of the teams in the 2018 World Cup. As you can see, you can fully interact with the data in this blog post. Infogram’s interactive data visualisations can be embedded in any site or blog post that supports HTML embedding.
Google’s Music Timeline
Google’s Music Timeline is a great example of data visualisation being used to present data in an engaging way that relates to the viewer’s personal experiences. The timeline allows the user to view and interact with data on the evolution of music and listening habits between the 1950s and the present day.
You can also separate the data by genre and era, so you can chart the popularity of a particular type of music over the last 60+ years. All of the albums displayed on the timeline can also be clicked on, and can be streamed directly using Google Play Music.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things – A Primer is, as the title suggests, a guide to the basics of The Internet of Things – the ways in which connected devices are changing the face of business, cities and even human interaction.
The site allows you to interact with visualised data on the most popular technologies that form the Internet of Things, such as wearables, smart home technology, transport, healthcare technology and more. You can also view and interact with data on the number of businesses, industries and people that embracing the IoT and the market value of it.
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At LamasaTech we’re fascinated by the ways in which interactive data visualisation can be used to engage, inspire and tell stories. If you’re looking for innovative new ways to visualise data, we’d love to help. Get in touch with a member of our expert team to discover more about our intuitive data visualisation technology.
