Checklist – visualizations
Make sure all the following is included/correct
in every visualization:
All numbers double checked
Headline/title
Spell check
Axis and legend titles (If possible. Otherwise described in caption)
Units
Y-axis starts at 0
Conscious choice of colors – (explained on request)
Source
Instructions for use (when needed)
Context or explanation (when needed)
Byline
Accessibility (contrast, caption for screen readers, attached table etc)
(explained on request)
Understandable for someone who sees the visualization for the first time
(show it to someone outside the newsroom)
Url with the visualization checked on a mobile device
- Smartphone: How do the charts from the different tools appear on your smartphone? Are there any problems?
- Not much of a problem, but the line charts from Datawrapper and Flourish look better than the one from Infogram since the latter is more compressed.
- Colours: How easy/difficult is it to change colours with the different tools?
- Quite easy with all of them I think.
- Text/labels: How easy/difficult is it to work with text/labels in the different tools?
- It was easiest with Flourish to insert the source in a neat way. Infogram was easy to add description in the chart if you want a smaller text, since its above the chart, while a longer one looks better on Datawrapper where it is placed below the chart.
- Flexibility: How flexible are the tools? Can you make the changes you want to do?
- I thought I could do quite a lot. Flourish seemed like it had a lot of functions which would make it easier to create it as you would like it to look like.
- Accessibility: Which different options for accessibility do the tools have?
- I did not see any such options for FLourish (maybe I missed it?). It was quite handy with datawrapper where it is readily available as an option without having to look around among the different options.
Conclusion
What are the main benefits of:
- Datawrapper?
- It was convenient to be able to copypaste selected data from an Excel file instead of downloading the whole file.
- Infogram?
- Both this one and Flourish were easier to manage than Datawrapper since it gives you an immediate preview of the graph, while with Datawrapper you have to go thorugh different steps, which is bothersome.
- Flourish?
- Many options to experiment with.
Which one of the tools do YOU prefer, so far?
Flourish was the nicest one to work with since it provided a lot of options to experiment with, gave immediate previews and was generally easy to manage.
2D
Maps/smartphone
Open the site (MIJ22) in your smartphone. Look at all the maps you have published:
Are the ok? Can you see the tooltips for example? Is there anything you have to change?
Describe your experience and how you solved the problems (if there were any) in your post at the website.
I think it works pretty well. Even though you cannot hover over a country you can still click on it to see the tooltips. For at least Datawrapper, however, the information does not show next to the region or country that you click on. Instead, it shows up at the bottom or top of the map, which is quite inconvenient, especially with the long Swedish map since it might not even show up on the screen unless you scroll up or down. I do not know how to solve this problem.