Telling a Story with Data Visualizations
New American Economy (NAE) is a bipartisan research and advocacy organization fighting for smart immigration policies that help grow the economy and create jobs for all Americans. They’re experts at collecting and analyzing complex data. And creating beautiful visualizations of that data to tell a story? That’s where Briteweb comes in.
An Interactive Digital Data Tool
NAE systematically measures local policies and socioeconomic outcomes to assess how immigrants are welcomed in America’s 100 largest cities. The organization wanted to use their abundance of data to create a digital tool that tracks where each city stands in its integration efforts, providing insight on how local communities can maximize the potential of their immigrant populations. When they came to Briteweb, that data lived in one massive spreadsheet. Our challenge: visually present their data in a way that engages city staffers and inspires them to improve their immigration policies.
Called the Cities Index, the tool needed to be easy to understand and engaging to interact with. It needed to tell the story behind the data. It needed to allow comparison between cities, and year-over-year comparisons, but not feel like a ‘best of’ list that accuses or disparages lower-scoring cities. And—most challenging of all—it needed to look as beautiful, and be as functional, on mobile devices as on a desktop.
Striking a Balance With Design
The data visualization solution created by our strategy and development teams strikes a fine balance between statistic and story; between photography, written content and data. It uses numbers to showcase what immigration integration looks like in America’s cities, without overusing charts and graphs. And it works pretty beautifully on a mobile phone (if we do say so ourselves).
