Attractive, interactive graphic challenges lazy readers

The New York Times spent a lot of effort making a nice interactive graphical feature to accompany their story about Uber's attempt to manipulate its drivers. The article is here. Below is a static screenshot of one of the graphics.

The illustrative map at the bottom is exquisite. It has Uber cars driving around, it has passengers waiting at street corners, the cars pick up passengers, new passengers appear, etc. There are also certain oddities: all the cars go at the same speed, some strange things happen when cars visually run into each other, etc.

This interactive feature is mostly concerned with entertainment. I don't think it is possible to infer either of the two metrics listed above the chart by staring at the moving Uber cars. The metrics are the percentage of Uber drivers who are idle and the average number of minutes that a passenger waits. Those two metrics are crucial to understanding the operational problem facing Uber planners. You can increase the number of Uber cars on the road to reduce average waiting time but the trade-off is a higher idle rate among drivers.

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One of the key trends in interactive graphics at the Times is simplication. While a lot of things are happening behind the scenes, there is only one interactive control. The only thing the reader can control is the number of drivers in the grid.

As one of the greatest producers of interactive graphics, I trust that they know what they are doing. In fact, this article describes some comments made by Gregor Aisch, who works at the Times. The gist is: very few readers play with their interactive graphics. Someone else said, "If you make a tooltip or rollover, assume no one will ever see it." I also have heard someone say (hope this is not merely a voice in my own head): "Every extra button or knob you place on the graphic, you lose another batch of readers." This might be called the law of the interactive knob, analogous to the law of the printed equation, in the realm of popular book publishing, which stipulates that every additional equation you print in a book, you lose another batch of readers.

(Note, however, that we are talking about graphics for communications here, not exploratory graphics.)

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Several years ago, I introduced the concept of "return on effort" in this blog post. Most interactive graphics are high effort to produce. The question is whether there is enough reward for the readers. 

Comments

[The Best Cars Release Date]

Haha, lazy reader is a disaster for everyone.
:P