Finding the right technology for Motion
If you do decide to go interactive, you have to think about what technology you're going to use. And this is a very largest subject, a lot of choices that are going to bring forward a bunch of different features and benefits and really this could almost be its own course, but I'm going to try to just outline some of the big issues and point out a few technologies within the current library available.
So, this, in the first rule when thinking about technology, is don't really think about technology. Okay? So, essentially you want your goals and your audience to drive all of your decisions, including your technology decisions. Think about your audience, okay? And yes, of course, you have to think about your technical capabilities. If you do that, the options will kind of reveal themselves, right? You'll be reduced to a manageable list to choose from. So, things to focusing on, one is the vision for the platform. Are you building a platform that needs to evolve and change over time? Or like a one-off, that's just going to be thrown out? If it's a one-off, maybe you find the simplest technology, you ignore re-usability and scalability.
Otherwise, you might pick a more robust, modular, reusable, scalable technology. You also think about your audience. What's their demographic, right? Are they technophobic and under gadgetized or techno driven and gadget laden? Are they somehow, I don't know how this could possibly be, but still stuck in a world of IE6 and blackberries, or are they more current in their technologies? Right? Many choices revolve around audience device compatibility.
Another thing to think about, is should you be using straightforward charts and graphs or maybe pushing the envelope both visually and in terms of interactivity and complexity of the visual experience, et cetera.
So there are a whole bunch of tools out there, tools like Tableau, which is a a platform for doing data analytics and visualization and creating dashboards, Power BI, which falls into a similar category.
You have web-based tools like Datawrapper, where you can upload your dataset and create interactive visualizations that can be embedded into websites or exported as images and put into graphics.
Tools like Flourish also, which allow you to create fairly customized animated visualizations with no technical experience within a limited set of templates.
You also have tools like Carto, which are cloud-based mapping tools, which allow you to create very sophisticated maps with again, very little technical expertise although you can add some technology to it and take it even further.
And you have tools like D3, which is a JavaScript library for creating all kinds of interactive animated visualizations, it's programming. So you can really create anything you can imagine within a set of established simple charts and graphs, sure, but because it's code, you can do literally anything you want.
And speaking of which, there's a platform called Observable. It's a cloud-based tool, a web-based interface for programming in all kinds of different libraries, including D3. And what's neat about this, is that the code, which by the way you can find other people's code and then play around with it, allows you to just make a change in the web browser like I'm going to change the duration and the delay for this visualization.
And now I can just make it happen and do exactly what I asked it to do. So you can experiment with your visualizations live in browser without setting up a server, without really even knowing too much about the code you're playing around with, because maybe it's something that somebody else created.
And then you can download that version of the code and expand upon it on your own. So tools like Observable and a lot of these other software packages are really amazing. Some of these are fairly new and bring a lot of life to the data visualization community and for your options when picking tools.
Other things to think about is, do you have the technical ability to pull off your vision? Right? If you're going to work in D3, Observable, et cetera, are you a programmer? If you got it, fantastic. Or if you need help, great. Do you have access to people to help you? And you also think about, who's going to be maintaining this long-term?
If it's no one but you, you can do whatever you want of course, but if you're handing it off to another team, it's of course conscientious to think about who might be picking it up and maintaining it down the road. If you know who it is, you know their capability is great. If you don't know who it might be, of course, you might want to lean a little bit closer to standards, technologies that are more abundant to be essentially more likely to be able to find somebody down the road who can maintain it. Another thing to think about, are the existing technical requirements.
Does your client or your company have the technology in place that might be driving the decisions you need to make? Right? Maybe they are an all Microsoft team.
Therefore, Microsoft technologies might be preferable or maybe they're all open source, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, it's about device limitations as well. So, by the way, if they have a tech team that's devoted to a particular type of technology, odds are, it's going to make sense to adhere to that.
Otherwise, maybe you have more freedom once again, to do whatever you want, or maybe that team wants to transition to something new and you can help them essentially accomplish that through the project you're working on. In the end, finding the technology to use can be a very nuanced process.
And by the way, it's only getting more nuanced. There are more tools, new things coming out all the time. So just remain client-focused, thoughtful, pick what works for the audience, the people managing the technology and collaborate with those folks as much as you possibly can.
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