Viz This: Some More Great DataViz 08 Tools

As the political primary season grinds on–oh, no, wait, it hasn’t actually started yet–I’ve become a collector of interesting data visualization projects that various publications have created for the year in politics ahead.

I’ve previously publicly admired the New York Times Debate Analyzer, USA Today’s Candidate Match Game, and the Washington Post’s Issue Tracker.

Three other dataviz [data visualizations, in webbist jargon] projects have caught my attention recently:

The LA Times’ Primary Tracker. Want to see why “SuperDuper Tuesday,” 25 Jan., will have such extraordinary impact on who the candidates in the general election will be? One quick slider-push on this tool makes it clear in alarming detail.

MSNBC’s Candidate + Issues Matrix. My current favorite in the “deadly cool if slightly clunky in use” category.

GlassBooth.com: View how you stack up relative to the candidates. Less visually playful than the USA Today entry in this field, but quite elegant to use.

They say politics brings out the worst in people. This campaign season, it’s bringing out the best is some dataviz designers.

[In the spirit of full disclosure: I'm working on an '08 dataviz project myself, which is why I've been watching. And I'm a former employee of the Washington Post.]

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MSNBC: Bomb and Strafe the Flyovers, Please

The Bivings Report, a blog operated by the web consulting firm the Bivings Group, today has an excellent analysis of the redesign of MSNBC.com.

In short, there are plenty of things wrong with it, though I am not as sour as Todd Zeigler, author of the Bivings item. The tour of the new site is in some ways more effective than a lot of the site itself.

The MSNBC site adds the usual 2.obligitories:

• Discussions [called "message boards" under the "participate" tab]
• UGC solicitations branded “First Person”
• mobile and IM news updates
• more RSS feeds than I had the patience to count (four pages’ worth!)
• widgets (horrifyingly self-promotional; check out the Matt-and-Meredith news widget)

Best new feature: A very simple customization feature that lets you move, collapse and expand content modules on landing pages (say, the Asian-Pacific module under World news). You do this by nudging the module up or down the page with up or down arrows and then clicking the number of stories you want displayed in that module, from 0 to 15. You can for instance push the “Terrorism” module to the top of your page, opening it wide to include 15 stories, and bury and collapse “Europe” completely. (I do not intend that in the Rumsfeldian sense of “bury and collapse Europe.”)

Worst old feature: That easy-to-hate, entirely inexplicable left-rail navigation that, when overmoused, launches flyover submenus across the page until all content on the incumbent page is hidden by prompts to content elsewhere. Some of these sub- or sub-submenus get “stuck” in the extended mode and require a click (or several) to make them recede.

But it gets worse! The items on the TV program-specific navigation across the top (Dateline, Meet the Press, MSNBC programs, etc.) when moused over also spawn flyovers that obscure vast chunks of content. This means it is possible to nudge your mouse absentmindedly across the top and left hand navigations in succession and mask over all MSNBC content.

All I can figure is someone in a corner office insisted on keeping the flyover navigation, which in my estimation is one of the biggest and most public usability errors on a major media site. Can someone please explain?