The 2014 budget highlighted data journalism’s mobile device woes

Data journalism is in vogue these days so what better time to draw up a graph than at budget time, when communicating lots of numbers efficiently is the top priority? The 2014 Budget saw some great data coverage across the board, but it also showed that one of data journalism’s biggest challenges was finding a format that works well on mobile devices. In this post I’ll take you through some of the stuff that worked really well on mobile and other stuff that didn’t translate from desktop.

Why is it important that data journalism works on mobile?

At the Digital Media Strategies 2014 conference earlier this month, Douglas McCabe of research firm Enders Analysis said that the time people spend on the internet on mobile devices will overtake the time they spend online on a desktop by next year.

If you have a blog, you only need to take a look at your analytics to see how much of your traffic comes from mobile devices. If you haven’t already done so, it will be a lot. It is, therefore, pretty important that your content works well on mobile and that carefully crafted visualisations, designed to make visitors invest some time on your site, don’t leave your readers putting down their phones in frustration.

Try viewing this on mobile if you want to experience what I mean.

2014 budget coverage – the Telegraph

I’m kicking off with the Telegraph‘s coverage because it was probably one of the best for working on mobile devices. (All the screenshots in this article were taken from my iPhone 5, so you would expect that it would be able to handle most things.)

Rather than attempt to embed their charts in the body of their article, the Telegraph programmed this chart viewer using their in-house chart building system and then linked to it from the body of their article. As you can see, it works really well. You can easily have the chart and the accompanying text side by side whilst being able to comfortably read both. It is also interactive and gives you the option of clicking onto the next chart.

This is all very well, but what if you don’t have the time, resources or inclination to build your own in-house chart system? 

The Guardian used Datawrapper to mixed effect on mobile

The Guardian’s data blog is a hotbed of interesting visualisations but for budget day they decided to keep it simple. They used what looks like customised versions of Datawrapper charts to display Osborne’s budget. Datawrapper is really responsive and should theoretically work really well on mobile. So on a day when a lot more people than normal are likely to be reading the data blog it makes sense to keep things simple rather than going for a more detailed graphic.

In reality, though there was a slight problem. This is what one of the line charts looked like:

The line of the graph itself showed up fine but the axes didn’t show up on the portrait version of my phone because they were too wide to fit on. Looking at it from this view, the chart isn’t very informative.

This problem was solved when turning the phone to a landscape view and this may seem like a pedantic point to highlight. However, the Guardian were relying on people realising that they needed to tilt their phones when reading the article and could well have confused those who didn’t realise this was needed. Why alienate a part of your audience, however small, when it could be accessible to them all?

When the Guardian’s charts worked well, however, they were probably the most interesting in terms of the story that they were telling. This bar chart showing that since 2010, Osborne’s budgets haven’t been particularly harsh or eventful was something that hadn’t been visualised anywhere else.

The Daily Mail tried hard with a 3D pie chart

The Daily Mail obviously tried to take all this into account by playing it pretty safe with their data coverage. Although not extensive, it did extend to this non-interactive gem of a pie chart:

For the purposes of this article, the Mail‘s chart succeeded because it could be read well on mobile. However, in terms of being an effective visualisation it fails miserably, committing a cardinal sin of data journalism. 3D pie charts may look flashy but the very nature of that third dimension skews how big the segments look to the naked eye. In this case the national insurance segment is actually smaller than the ‘other’ segment’ but it would be difficult to tell this by looking at the graph.

Ampp3d’s 2014 budget coverage was designed for mobile

Ampp3d is a relatively new website set up by Trinity Mirror with the remit to create socially shareable data journalism. They run their site on Tumblr and as such it is really responsive to different formats. Ampp3d was basically set up to compare favourably in a piece such as the one I am writing. And, it does.

They, like the Guardian, used Datawrapper to communicate different aspects of the budget. However, because Tumblr is more responsive than the Guardian’s site, the charts’ axes were still visible when the phone was held in portrait mode. This meant that whichever way you looked at it, it was easy for a reader to read the bar chart and subsequently understand the story.

Visualisations will adapt to mobile but we have to adapt as well

None of the visualisations discussed in this post were terrible. There were no attempts at the type of elaborate map that is impossible to read on mobile.  Some were really good and most had only minor flaws. But when trying to persuade somebody to spend time on your site, those minor flaws can be the difference between them staying or bouncing.

Visualisation software will no doubt improve in the future and render many of these problems irrelevant. Until that happens, however, data journalists have to take the limitations of mobile into account, even if it means sacrificing an impressive Tableau for a simple table.

Patrick E Scott

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Professional unpaid journalist. Would like to be paid.

Posts about Data, Social Media and anything that takes my fancy

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