Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Rise of the news DJs
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
July 18, 2014, 10:58 a.m.
Mobile & Apps
LINK: mobilev.is  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   July 18, 2014

Two of the biggest trends in news today: the rise of mobile and the rise of data visualization.

mobilevisThe unfortunate reality is that they’re often in conflict. Too many beautiful data visualizations are designed with a big desktop browser window in mind, not the smaller screen of an iPhone or an Android phone. Text becomes unreadable, interactions become untappable, and a lovely experience becomes unusable.

If you want to do better, check out MobileVis, a site built by Bocoup data viz whiz Irene Ros to assemble good examples of data visualizations that work well on mobile devices. (It’s funded by a Knight Prototype Fund grant.) There are lots of screenshots, illustrations of pages in motion, and notes about what makes them compelling. Ros also pulls out a set of best practices for doing visualizations for mobile:

Vertical Bar Charts: When using bar charts in portrait mode, stack your bar chart bars vertically.

Use Vertical Scrolling: When creating interfaces that don’t fit in their entirety on the screen, enable vertical scrolling instead of horizontal scrolling.

Stack Table Cells: When needing to display tables that have more than a couple of columns consider stacking cells vertically within each row.

Carousel Instead of Tabs: When allowing users to switch between different displays, instead of using tabs (which require a lot of horizontal space,) consider using a carousel with next and previous buttons.

Fix Tooltips to Area of Screen: When displaying information on touch, designate an area on screen that will update accordingly.

Use Touch Zones: When displaying a lot of data points that are hoverable/touchable, consider using defined touch zones instead.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Rise of the news DJs
“For an increasing subset of readers, ‘articles’ will be as invisible as CSS code.”
The future-of-journalism crowd stops ignoring local TV news
“The reality is that people of color in the U.S. are more likely to turn to TV news for local information than they are newspapers or digital-first local news.”
Journalism prepares for a post-search, post-social future
“The loss of reach for news publishers comes with a loss of visibility, which is likely to hit new, digital-born journalism organizations the hardest.”