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It looks neat, but unlike the Hans Rosling example someone else mentioned, the animation adds no additional information. Showing just the last frame would get the same point across much quicker and more accessible. It's a form of chartjunk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk

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razemio 11 days ago | parent | next [-]

You know how a presenter asks questions on a topic where he is the expert? Same goes for this animation. It does not show but hide information to keep the reader engaged. I found myself guessing who will be first and boy was I wrong. My ego would have prevented me from noticing, if the chart would have been presented to me right away.

On YouTube you can see how well this works. There are channels with a huge follower base just existing because of this animation.

	▲	noduerme 10 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not completely unrelated, the mechanical horse race game that used to be at The D in Vegas, and now is at the Linq (I think?) has a similar effect on the human psyche. As does gambling on most sporting events. Anything with a lot of ups and downs. I really started to think about this when I was developing casino games about 15 years ago. But the same is true with any game, or any future event. When an outcome is unknown, we experience time as a set of discrete emotional peaks and valleys - we experience an extra dimension of time, the high/low. Apart from being a highly successful design hook, I think it can be a really powerful way to encode information. Especially if you have time-referenced data and you've already exhausted the other axes or relative sizes you might use to convey your dimensions. Like, my main argument with using that "race" is that you could use the x-axis for something else, and have the whole graph change over time. But you're very right that this indeed relies on an emotional component to achieve the full effect of conveying time in two dimensions. If there's no emotional attachment to the outcome, our brains don't process the highs or lows. In that case, a variance chart like open/close prices on the stock market might work better.
	▲	kortilla 10 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		These channels don’t exist because it’s a better way to display information. It’s a more click bait way. A chart that works that way is the title equivalent of “you won’t guess who wins”. I get sucked into those “X over 50 years videos” and watch to the end to get the satisfaction. But it doesn’t help me remember the outcome at all. It’s just engagement bait in video form. A chart on a webpage like this is just chart junk like the poster said unless it’s actually updating in real time.

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NiloCK 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At the risk of piling on (others have commented), I'll go so far as to say that there really is more information here if you make the gentle assumption of a human observer.

In the animated version, a human observer here is allowed (forced) to occupy mental states of a real-time observer. They have the experience of "X has jumped ahead - I wonder if it'll last - oh, wow, Y is really surging".

The visceral experience matters, and is impossible to recreate post-hoc if all of the info is presented up front.

(edit: "more information" in so far is it informs more - leaves more impressions on the observer)

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FredPret 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1. The race animation adds no information, but better communicates the idea that we're looking at a series of moments in time, each with its own history and emotional impact. Watching the lines race shows us what it would've felt like looking at this graph during each year.

2. The Chartjunk wiki cites Adolf Loos's idea "ornamentation is a crime". But I think we're done with modern minimalism and in the process of rediscovering the joy in ornamentation. This is an aesthetic choice and you may disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

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bjarneh 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the animation adds no additional information.

No it removes information; to be able to focus on one period at a time as it evolves.

Seeing a "living graph" of how something evolves is different than seeing the graph fully drawn statically, that cannot be considered chart junk IMO.

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helloplanets 10 days ago | parent [-]

Following the parent comment's idea, it'd end up in a table being the best choice 100% of the time.

Because the underlying assumption is that accessibility and the ability to grasp the data that is being conveyed isn't completely dependent on the audience. If I happen to prefer a static chart, an animated chart might still convey the intended thing in a stickier way, to a wider audience.

	▲	bjarneh 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fully agree. He must have been itching to use the term "chart junk" :-)

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dijksterhuis 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it would get the point across much faster. but it would be a less enjoyable interaction. this is an example graph that i'm never going to look at ever again. i don't even need to care about information. like, it's mostly irrelevant to me. it's a toy example. and it's a bit of a fun example to make people go 'huh, this is a cool vizualisation package'.

if i had a dashboard i needed to use at work set up like that i'd have a bloody conniption after a week. but this isn't a work dashboard -- it's a functionality demo and i'm more likely to remember echarts now as a result (purpose of examples achieved).

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10 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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