The BBC have created a fascinating interactive infographic ‘Your Life on Earth’. All you need to do is input some basic personal data and it will generate a series of visual facts, figures and comparisons that have been based on your lifetime. These range from the number of times your heart has beaten since you were born and your age on Mercury, to harder hitting facts, such as CO2 emissions and population increase. It gives you the opportunity to explore how the world has changed during your lifetime. You are also given the option to share the just your favourite insights or of course you can share the whole thing.
The infographic cleverly identifies how small and relatively insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of things, all the while highlighting how influential we have been in changing our planet.
User experience
Designed to evoke a number of emotions, central to this is the clear presentation of data. Graphs and images are well designed and engaging. The comparisons used are neither too complicated to understand nor dumbed down. You feel as though you have learnt something from the data, and it compels you to continue reading. This infographic is an excellent way to engage children as well as adults.
Data
There is an incredible amount of data involved here, all of which creates talking points. They break the hard hitting facts up with softer interesting points, allowing you to be shocked but not leaving with a sense of hopelessness.
By making all the data personal to the viewer, the information is far more likely to be retained. It is also more sharable, which in reality is, along with user interaction, the most important part of the exercise.
Is it complicated to produce?
The simple answer is no, the coding used would be relatively simple and would relate to a number of calculations and logarithms related to each fact. There is no actual kinetic interaction coding required, which makes the task simpler.
Interactive infographics have become a fantastically useful tool in digital marketing. They offer engaging and active content, which is quite often personalised. These factors vastly increase the share-ability, increasing your audience engagement and boosting your SEO and website visibility. Another bonus is attracting possible PR, outreach and blog placement.