The World Cup — of information?
Visuals of World Cup
The World Cup is a veritable festival of football and entertainment. Moving away from on-field action, I look at 5 data-driven presentations which deserve praise for style, conciseness and elegance.
Trust Google to take the lead in living up to their mission to:
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
What better place to start our quest than the most basic search query on Google: World Cup 2018.
What we get is a neat table.
There is literally so much happening in the World Cup but to split it into the most important categories says a lot about forethought and planning. The six categories cover everything people really care about. The structure and careful defaults (to match info) make it clear that the designers had great empathy for user behavior and their information consumption styles. The link to the video clip, which plays on hover also, is very handy. This truly is the one grid that rules them all when it comes to selective information presentation. The icing on the cake is the link to the Wikipedia site on the right. Another information presentation masterclass from Google. We take this for granted but when we take just a small step back and realize how much information is condensed at our fingertips (literally), it is overwhelming.
Defining beauty: Search and you shall find, and it comes neatly arranged in bite sized wrappers
Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s World Cup page is also close on the heels (sorry football analogy had to be inserted). Information is presented in its classic format and updated in real time.
The page, which you can scroll for a long time, lists everything that you may want to know about the World Cup. Don’t know where Yekaterinburg is? Well, there is a map, stadium information and on the matches below, it also shows actual attendance. This is not to mention the hyperlinks to actual cities, which call out to an adventure of their own. We can find all the information we want:
- without leaving our desk/chair
- without moving our mouse more than 2cm
- without going to any other site and
- without waiting more than 1 second for anything to load
Defining beauty: Cutting to the chase, and fast
FIFA
It’s great to see the organization responsible for the World Cup having a separate tab on their main website for tournament Statistics. The tab presents various categories of highlights e.g. top scorers, tournament statistics etc.
Each high level category is supported by further statistics, typically tables. Armchair junkies love tables. More often than not, they are playing fantasy league, prediction games, sweepstakes or are simply building their own knowledge. Yes, imbibing football knowledge is a valid sport / art / science.
What FIFA does best of course is show player photos. Players are their crown jewels and displaying them smiling, in uniform and with country flags, allows information to assume a persona. Instead of Harry Kane being on 5 goals, its Harry Kane on 5 goals!. Real images bring data to life. Sure much of this information can also be found via a feed etc. But FIFA provides a more authentic experience of finding the same information.
Defining beauty: Reality, authentic experience. Nothing beats getting information from the source itself.
FiveThirtyEight
This is a data firm and unlike generic sources above, their visualization focuses on bracket and match probabilities. It allows hours of interactive fun.
There are many interactive brackets but I’ve not seen better. It is visually appealing and thoughtfully color coded (dark green is higher chance than lighter greens). Attention to detail is also there. Once we select a potential group winner, the probabilities are adjusted automatically for the other three. The other tab on matches show the probability of win/loss/draw for each game. Like all good data visualizations, they also explain how their model works!
Defining beauty: Clean, analytical, and visually appealing interactive presentation
BBC Football
This entry is here on the basis of one info graphic. After making what sounded like a tall claim: “Everything you need to know in 7 charts”; I was keen to see how this could be done. I was not disappointed.
The infographic breaks down the World Cup essentials into 7 questions e.g. Who has won the most trophies, who has scored the most etc. There is a mandatory one for England (minor detail: it is from the British Broadcasting Corporation) but apart from that, the questions range from the usual ones to more pressing ones e.g. how the hosts have typically fared etc. Attention to detail is what takes the cake here. Looking at this image, it’s delightful to see each tournament being represented by the respective match ball. So while Fontaine reigned supreme in one tournament, others like Pele etc. have scored with different types and literally different colors of balls.
Defining beauty: Breaking down a subject into key questions, delightful use of icons to convey information while saving real estate
There is always something for everyone at the World Cup. It’s the beautiful game for a reason.
