Candy, vegetables and data
Lessons from my first foray into news apps
The Daily Illini has an interesting history with being online. It was one of the first college newspapers to actually get a site up and running, and pushed relatively early for online databases. Except in the last couple years. In the last few years, it’s been left in the dust.
The Daily Illini Salary Guide was birthed in spring 2010. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Daily Illini set free tens of thousands of public employee salaries, printed in an enormous guide where each employee was listed, phone-book style. It also ended up going online in a database, quickly thrown together by an in-house PHP developer. I’m not sure what people expected, but almost immediately, it became our largest source of traffic.
Not like,Oh, we have lots of sources of content, each of them are a tiny slice of the pie. No, this online database, to this day, makes up more of our traffic than any of our four content sections.
Oh, the powers that be.
So how do you make a cash cow better? Any change to a system that works, marginally, is going to be met with resistance internally, as I learned the previous year in an attempt to render the Salary Guide as a Tableau dashboard.It ruined ad revenue, because it didn’t reload the page every time someone queried the database. So naturally, we began redirecting users to the old database.
Things like that nearly convinced me that it served relatively little purpose, journalistically speaking. It gave a single number for each employee, but nothing more.
Most of our thousands of viewers weren’t interested in someone’s salary as part of some public scrutiny of payment of public employees. That’s not what makes salary databases valuable.What makes them valuable are people’s natural inclination toward voyeurism, and we’d been dishing it up for years.
As part of the candy/vegetable model that keeps media enterprises rolling, it was positively saturated with high fructose corn syrup.
So when faced with the chance to do the Salary Guide correctly, the big question was always: How can we transform candy into healthy information for our users?
The answer I returned to, time and time again, was context. How does a person relate to their peers, their supervising unit? How much more do leaders make than their employees?
But all of this was built around the fact what drives interest in these data is based off of individuals and their paycheck, not the larger scheme of things. We had to hijack that instinct, and use it to teach unwitting viewers things about the University of Illinois.
That’s where design started being crucial. Sure, plenty of time was spent building medians, ranks, deviances and other stats on the data every way it could be sliced, but we had to deliver information to an audience that wasn’t here to learn about those things.
Many things, like a dashboard detailing stats on a person’s college and department were nixed simply because we found it cluttered everything up, and made it incredibly difficult to deliver the information.
I landed on a highlighted histogram, an idea lovingly hijacked from my news apps mentor Michael Corey at the Center for Investigative Reporting, showing immediately where an employee fit into things:
People immediately responded positively to this. An easy-to-parse visual, that communicates rank in more relatable terms than a number. And from this, we sneak in information about how pay is distributed in a college, reinforcing a message that should making its way through data journalism communities: Single data points are damn near useless.
In the end, the designer and I agreed on this minimalist package that makes up version 1.0:
And now, I wait. It should be interesting to see how people respond to this. My dreams tonight will be filled with nightmares of crashing servers. The version that launches tonight is, again, just 1.0, and soon-to-come iterations should introduce more interactivity.
I don’t have a great way to know whether people are eating their vegetables while using this app, but more on that later... But at the very least, we’re serving broccoli alongside the dessert. Let’s keep making news apps a part of a balanced breakfast.
