councours Google de DataViz

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with the winners of the Councours Google de DataViz: the Google DataViz Contest that ran in France in late 2011. The challenge was to "unleash the power of Twitter and Google data by developing an innovative web application for tracking the French presidential election." Participants were urged to take a new look at the campaign by making an intelligent interface for data vizualization.

Here's a static view of the winning visualization:

I encourage you to view and explore the full interactive version here, created by Stephane Raux, Ronan Quidu, Alexis Jacomy, and Nils Grunwald. In our informal meeting, I told them a bit about the course I teach, we spent time looking at their visual and discussing their work/thought process for generating it, and chatted on data viz in general.

The guys expressed some wonder at winning a data viz contest with a bar chart. I think it's fantastic. One goal they set for themselves early on was to make something that their grandmothers could understand. They had some apprehension when they saw some early postings of other participants' submissions packed with bells and whistles (you can view all the submissions here). We agreed that, while it seems the opposite might be true, making something complicated-looking is actually a lot easier than taking a bunch of data and making it fit together in a way that's easy to understand and explore. This latter approach takes a lot of time and iterations. They commented how useful it was to get feedback from people not close to the project (the graphic designer came in later in the project and while a bit frustrating for him, the others commented on the unintended success of this approach since his fresh perspective meant he could take an outsider's viewpoint which was helpful). 

I really enjoyed the time we spent together and I'm super impressed by their interactive visual that packs in a lot of information and yet is straightforward and easy to explore and interpret. Many of the approaches the guys took and decisions they made were reinforcing of the lessons I teach: keep your audience in mind throughout the design process, use preattentive attributes like color and size to draw attention where you want it, seek feedback from people not involved in the project for a fresh perspective and to direct iterations, and one of my personal golden rules of dataviz: simple beats sexy.