Chapter 6. Creating interactive visualizations
This chapter covers
- The benefits of dynamic versus static diagrams
- Navigating the chart
- Charting user actions
- Using animation sparingly
- Designing for mobile platforms
Although the earliest graphs were drawn using pencil and paper, modern graph visualization is all done via computer. As a result, the charts being produced don’t have to be static images but can change in response to user input. The benefit of interactive visualizations is that you aren’t limited to whatever you can print on a page—you can display complex data that users can drill into. A perfect example of this is how a newspaper might use an infographic in its print edition but offer a better interactive graph visualization in its online version of the story. Adding interactivity to a graph allows users to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the data. Let’s return to the Abramoff chart that we first encountered in chapter 5, reproduced in figure 6.1.
