The BBCs election map

I have to share this if you haven't seen it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/americas/04/vote_usa/map/html/default.stm

Its an impresive peice of technology, you can zoom in to see the votes for each state, it also promts you to update when it has new data, has historical data etc.

Its on of the most useful things I have seen Flashed used for.

I wish I programmed if!

Yes, quite a good one, we have commented on that over here in our offices too. Just shows that they still know how to pack a punch. They've could have made it a tad prettier, though...

On 15:19:08 3 November 2004 John Wards wrote:
>Oh my brain, i've probably missed more glaring
>errors...but that should be Flash and "programmed
>it"
>
>Excuse the spelling too, not enough caffine and no spell
>checker is my excuse ;-)

Impressive animation, i agree. But what is the point of zooming in and out of states if you don't get more details? Why isn't each state divided up into counties?

The only advantage of this animation is that you learn a little bit more about the US's geography. I didn't know, for example, that Wyoming is rectangular in shape.

A much better version with much more content is CNN's version: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/

I hope that the BBC dev's team recycled existing technolgies for this or else it was a rather expensive effort to display a limited amount of information.

On 10:35:04 4 November 2004 lazar wrote:
>Yes, quite a good one, we have commented on that over here
>in our offices too. Just shows that they still know how to
>pack a punch. They've could have made it a tad prettier,
>though...
>
>On 15:19:08 3 November 2004 John Wards wrote:
>>Oh my brain, i've probably missed more glaring
>>errors...but that should be Flash and "programmed
>>it"
>>
>>Excuse the spelling too, not enough caffine and no
>spell
>>checker is my excuse ;-)

It would be interesting to carry out user testing of this solution, comparing results to the HTML version (which works much better for me).

I think in this case people are not so much after learning about local geography or experiencing a cool animation as much as figuring out who won where - the stats.

And there could be improvements too. There is no need to be able to zoom into the map as much as one is allowed, for example. All stuff that adds weight to the animation. Lets not forget that most people are still accessing the net on dial-up connections. How smooth would the animation be on 56K?