Cool! As I tweeted, I grokked it pretty quickly when I first saw it. But that's probably not a good guide to general comprehensibility. :-)
I don't think you need the horizontal lines (marking round fifties of majorities SFAICT), just the single 'finish line' of a majority of seats. They're only remotely useful in the far outer reaches of the graph - where we are talking about majorities over 100 - and this election is so not going there. A single line would also be clearer as a finish/win line.
More labels would probably help the uninitiated, but obviously, many more and it'll get unusably crowded. Maybe try % signs after the vote shares in the popup? Would make that instantly clear what that means, I think - vote shares are the main thing that are percentages in elections, apart from swings.
The vote-share black lines could be labelled near the edges (since they're least useful), and you could leave the centre line unmarked. Then label the segments of lines something like 'L 10% > LD', 'C 20% > L', or 'L vs C +10%'. The minimal solution is just labelling them '10%', '20%', which'd be neater. But I like the idea of labelling the ends of the lines separately to cue people in to what they mean. I doubt that most people would instantly understand that - for example - the black line in the bottom left-hand corner showed where Labour had 30% greater vote share than the Lib Dems in the upper segment but where it had a 30% greater vote share than the Tories in the bottom segment. And understanding that is key to understanding the whole chart, I think.
I wonder if you could lose the +/- majority bit from the top of the seat graph columns. The +/- strongly makes one think of a change from the last election (or at least it does me), so this is another confusion you could lose. It is handy information, though - perhaps you could add it in as a line of text underneath? Saying, e.g. 'Lab maj 25' or 'Hung, Lab 65 short, Con 63 short'. (Using the same algorithm for when you show both Lab and Con short of a majority rather than just one - which empirically seems to do the job beautifully but I couldn't instantly see how it worked.) Might take up a lot of space, though.
The 2005 point is cool, and to me made it clear that the boundary changes would have seriously eaten in to Labour's majority last time. But that's because I know that the Labour majority was way more than the 21. Can you add a specific point in that popup? Or add to a series of notes at the bottom of the page something like 'The 2005 general election vote share is shown on the graph for information. In 2005, Labour won a majority of 66, but this model suggests that with the boundary changes since then they would only have had a majority of 21 seats.'
The two purple hexes look more significant than they are (SFAICT they are where the vote share whole-number percentages happen to map on to a perfect Lab/Con tie in seats) - maybe change to a vertical red/blue split?
Another suggestion for an explanatory note: You can see that the red area of the graph (Labour majority) is much larger than the blue area (Conservative majority), and both are hugely larger than the yellow area (Lib Dem majority). This dramatically illustrates the difference between our current electoral system and a pure proportional representation system (where the areas would be equal).
I don't think you want a 'change from last election' in there (crowded enough). Maybe yet another note - perhaps just adding seat numbers to 2005 note. Ah - perhaps you could have it as an extra thing underneath the whole graph. Actually, it'd be good if as well as the popup you could have a panel underneath that would show more/fuller/more fully labelled information, updated by where you last mousedover. (Mouseovered?) Ooh - actually, it could fix underneath if you clicked on a hex. That'd be very cool because as a user you'd be able to click on a point of interest, then navigate away from the page to sth else (e.g. Twitter, other poll results, or the live feed, or your blog, or whatever) and the data from the point of interesting in the graph would still be there for comparison without you having to hunt down that specific pt again. But can imagine the JS being hairy.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-04-26 12:16 pm (UTC)I don't think you need the horizontal lines (marking round fifties of majorities SFAICT), just the single 'finish line' of a majority of seats. They're only remotely useful in the far outer reaches of the graph - where we are talking about majorities over 100 - and this election is so not going there. A single line would also be clearer as a finish/win line.
More labels would probably help the uninitiated, but obviously, many more and it'll get unusably crowded. Maybe try % signs after the vote shares in the popup? Would make that instantly clear what that means, I think - vote shares are the main thing that are percentages in elections, apart from swings.
The vote-share black lines could be labelled near the edges (since they're least useful), and you could leave the centre line unmarked. Then label the segments of lines something like 'L 10% > LD', 'C 20% > L', or 'L vs C +10%'. The minimal solution is just labelling them '10%', '20%', which'd be neater. But I like the idea of labelling the ends of the lines separately to cue people in to what they mean. I doubt that most people would instantly understand that - for example - the black line in the bottom left-hand corner showed where Labour had 30% greater vote share than the Lib Dems in the upper segment but where it had a 30% greater vote share than the Tories in the bottom segment. And understanding that is key to understanding the whole chart, I think.
I wonder if you could lose the +/- majority bit from the top of the seat graph columns. The +/- strongly makes one think of a change from the last election (or at least it does me), so this is another confusion you could lose. It is handy information, though - perhaps you could add it in as a line of text underneath? Saying, e.g. 'Lab maj 25' or 'Hung, Lab 65 short, Con 63 short'. (Using the same algorithm for when you show both Lab and Con short of a majority rather than just one - which empirically seems to do the job beautifully but I couldn't instantly see how it worked.) Might take up a lot of space, though.
The 2005 point is cool, and to me made it clear that the boundary changes would have seriously eaten in to Labour's majority last time. But that's because I know that the Labour majority was way more than the 21. Can you add a specific point in that popup? Or add to a series of notes at the bottom of the page something like 'The 2005 general election vote share is shown on the graph for information. In 2005, Labour won a majority of 66, but this model suggests that with the boundary changes since then they would only have had a majority of 21 seats.'
The two purple hexes look more significant than they are (SFAICT they are where the vote share whole-number percentages happen to map on to a perfect Lab/Con tie in seats) - maybe change to a vertical red/blue split?
Another suggestion for an explanatory note: You can see that the red area of the graph (Labour majority) is much larger than the blue area (Conservative majority), and both are hugely larger than the yellow area (Lib Dem majority). This dramatically illustrates the difference between our current electoral system and a pure proportional representation system (where the areas would be equal).
I don't think you want a 'change from last election' in there (crowded enough). Maybe yet another note - perhaps just adding seat numbers to 2005 note. Ah - perhaps you could have it as an extra thing underneath the whole graph. Actually, it'd be good if as well as the popup you could have a panel underneath that would show more/fuller/more fully labelled information, updated by where you last mousedover. (Mouseovered?) Ooh - actually, it could fix underneath if you clicked on a hex. That'd be very cool because as a user you'd be able to click on a point of interest, then navigate away from the page to sth else (e.g. Twitter, other poll results, or the live feed, or your blog, or whatever) and the data from the point of interesting in the graph would still be there for comparison without you having to hunt down that specific pt again. But can imagine the JS being hairy.
Out of time & chars!