Editors there say the investment of time spent on the development of the game has proven to be well worth it. To find out what it took to produce the project and how USA Today measures the success of an interactive feature like this, I talked with Senior Designer Juan Thomassie.
Sara Quinn: How did the idea come about?
Juan Thomassie: Many months ago we started having planning meetings for the upcoming election. I was teamed up with Joshua Hatch — he was the producer; I was the designer/developer. We brainstormed a list of ideas related to the primaries: polling, election results, anything related to the campaign, including issues.
We wanted to come up with some interactive and issues-themed way to differentiate the candidates. The field was growing. I think there were about 18 or 19 candidates in the running at the time.
How did interactivity help to tell the story?
Thomassie: Some candidates had a very high profile and some were not so well-known. The candidate match game was a way to use some issues-related questions and multiple choice answers to help readers get an idea of which was closest to their views.
At one point, the idea was to make it more of a fact-or-fiction idea. We would post a question and let you answer and see if you were surprised by the results.
The presumption was that readers might not be so well-informed about candidates. We just posed them as a Q&A, a blind quiz. Each time you chose your answer, we’d reveal question by question which things matched.
We were surprised that most people who took (that version of) the quiz said, “I had no idea I agreed with this candidate.”
How many ideas were on the table?
Thomassie: We actually drew up a few storyboards and kind of played around with the idea of a horse race theme. As you answered the questions, the candidates who you are most like would go farther on the track. We decided that idea was a little too light. It wasn’t just a game.
The challenge for us was to find that sweet spot between newsy and informative and fun and interactive. We pulled back from the horse race and used the vertical bars format that we ultimately used.
With candidates headed to the conventions, what’s next for your interactive coverage?
Thomassie: We’ve just published the second version of the Candidate Match Game. For the last four weeks, it looked like the head-to-head election was likely going to be McCain vs. Obama. So we were researching the candidates’ positions on the big issues, designing a new interface around statements rather than multiple choice questions, and developing an interface to show whether you were more aligned with one candidate’s statements or the other’s.
We tried to maintain some of the look and branding from the first game, but game two is fundamentally different. We will now begin to see, through traffic metrics and feedback from readers, if we made the game as fun and informative as the first attempt. There may be some updates to Match Game II in the weeks ahead to add features or to add issues that become relevant in the months of campaigning ahead, so check back on the URL every so often!
We’re also updating our interactive polling graphics to focus on state-by-state feeds of McCain vs. Obama polling data. We use curve-fitting algorithms to combine all of the various sources of data into a much clearer trend line that gives the reader something more than the sum of all of the data.
What challenges does this narrowed field of candidates represent?
Thomassie: I think because it’s down to two, it’ll be a little trickier. They do tend to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. The challenge will be finding the right statements. If you’re one of the undecided, it might just help you clarify.
What were the important talents involved in producing this interactive graphic?
Thomassie: A collaborative effort between the political editor, the producer and myself. Ultimately, we rely on the politics team as the experts, both on where the candidates stand and being able to produce support statements.
We could never get the candidates to say, “This is my position.” But we do things like find quotes from debates or speeches.
I think it took a lot of what goes into every successful interactive graphic, three parts:
- One for design (the presentation of the information)
- The second area is the content (that obviously has a lot to do with familiarity with candidates, issues, and politics in general). That’s where teamwork really comes into play the most, being able to have conversations.
- The third area is really what sets apart print and online –- Development. Each piece of the equation in interactivity requires some level of programming and familiarity with dynamic content, often dealing with databases and queries and presentation of the data.
You team up with a designer, developer and an editor. It’s rare that one person does all of this alone.
It takes a lot of good planning. This represented many months of meetings, conceptualization, brainstorming, storyboarding, development of prototypes. As we’d get feedback from prototypes we’d rebuild things — make significant changes to the model in key points in the process. But each time it got better and was a really useful process.
This is such an investment of resources. How did you let people know that the feature was there?
Thomassie: We promoted it heavily on the USA Today homepage, on the politics homepage and in the newspaper.
Then, thru blogs and word of mouth, it really started to get some play in the media. It steamrolled from there. We saw the match game discussed on a local TV station where they talked about how helpful it was. We saw a discussion on C-SPAN about it. It just caught on in political blogs, news blogs and interactive graphics blogs, and we were a bit surprised by the steady stream of traffic it was generating.
It is still one of the most viewed and shared links on USAToday’s Web site. As candidates dropped out, we didn’t eliminate them from the game, but indicated that they were no longer in the race –- but still someone who you might be closely aligned with.
How else did it evolve over the months?
Thomassie: We added a USAToday Gallup poll to the feature, based on those same questions and answers, so you could see how your choices compared with the most popular choices of U.S. voters. The game launched a week or two before the poll results were available, but we were able to the poll results without any problems.
Again, something like this takes so much time. How do you decide what is worth the time it takes to create something like this?
If someone comes to the page, interacts with the graphic, spends time digging for more content — spending at least 5 or 6 minutes on a page — it’s worth it. We can track that.
The time spent on the graphic is important, and the bigger picture of how relevant that content and information is over time. That was a key strategic question that we asked before even considering devoting resources to it.
What about interactivity for daily publication?
Thomassie: On a daily basis, if it’s a breaking news story, then there’s a compelling push to do a news graphic. But to determine if it should be interactive, you have to ask if it will be of interest in two weeks or down the road.
This clearly was worth the time spent, with 14 months before the election date; We knew that there would be a long-term interest. We tried to capitalize on interactivity to serve the best interests of our readers for a long-term value.
Though it took weeks of development, the results we got from this are a resounding “yes” when we get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, for months and months and months.
