- [Instructor] There's an ongoing argument
about the validity of using eye candy
to keep things interesting,
so we entertain as well as inform.
I fall clearly on the side
that acknowledges that as communicators,
we must entertain while we inform.
But this entertainment
can't come at the expense of accuracy and truthfulness
in our data communications.
For instance, you shouldn't pick fancy charts
just because they're more interesting than a bar chart,
unless they're also at least equally
as accurate, understandable, and clear.
Eye candy really serves three purposes.
The first one is to keep things
fresh, interesting, and engaging.
But equally as important if not more so,
eye candy can serve to draw the eye
to what's most important.
Think of animation as being beautiful and engaging, sure,
but also functional
in that it can help make sure your audience
notices the important stuff.
And not only do we draw the eye to what's important,
sometimes we can indicate with our eye candy
that something is not just visual, but active.
For instance, a bouncing object can be a cue to an audience
that it's clickable.
I can't emphasize enough that eye candy has to be functional
or at a minimum, not detract from your functionality.
Data stories are best
when they walk that line very carefully.
They're best when they artfully combined
information and entertainment form and function.
Two of my favorite data visualization artists today
are Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.
They both do really interesting work.
And one of my favorite projects in recent years
is the collaborative that they called Dear Data.
Each week, they sent each other postcards of data sketches
after tracking different variables in their lives
throughout the week.
They always took a different approach from each other,
and each one is compelling and interesting and creative.
As is typical of their work,
most of the visual approaches are nonstandard.
They're definitely eye candy
because they're visually fresh and interesting.
As is sometimes the case with fresh and interesting visuals,
your audience might need some handholding
to understand what they're looking at and what it means.
If you create work like this,
you need to know it's worth your audience's effort
to invest in learning a new way of reading their data.
I think Stefanie and Giorgia
pulled this off in most of their sketches.
And by the way, this project not only became a book,
but it became an exhibit
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
So yeah,
I'm not alone in thinking they pulled off
something pretty special.
If you want a far more conventional example,
I can share one of my projects.
This is from a large interactive dashboard
looking at the resilience to risk
of 130 countries around the world.
What I want to focus in on
is that swarm plot at the bottom down here.
Each country's score quartile
is reflected on the map in color,
and it's repeated here in the swarm plot,
which reveals not only the quartile color again,
but also how all the country's individual scores
compare on the entire scale.
Did you see how it animated in when the page loaded?
That captures attention.
And notice the animation when you open up the single score
to reveal the three sub-scores that it's made from.
This simple transition really brings it to life.
And if you've preselected a country,
you can even track how it moves
from the single score to the sub-scores.
This is simple stuff, but a really effective
yet not distracting use of animation
to bring this story to life.
I take a lot of care with my projects
to make sure that animations and transitions
are timed very subtly
and carefully to draw the eye,
let people know that something is active,
and to make things more visually interesting
without unnecessarily distracting
or delaying the experience.
Don't let anyone tell you eye candy is unimportant.
As long as our attention spans continue to shrink,
and the competition
for your audience's attention gets fiercer,
eye candy will be more and more critical
to communicating anything.
Make sure that whatever eye candy you employ
serves your audience
and adds to the value of what you're communicating.
Never undermine your quality and accuracy
in exchange for eye candy.
But at the same time,
you should never be satisfied
with a stale boring old bar chart
if a more lively animated and visual approach is available.