2018 Midterm Elections


 

01 | Midterms, Intro

 
 

Check out the live website here.

In November 2018, I was fortunate enough to work on CNN’s fantastic team of editorial writers, storytellers, art directors to think through the ways show the U.S. midterm elections.

A midterm election is primarily focused on the two chambers of Congress, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. These two chambers often control the agenda and have a huge impact on the direction of the country. A third of the 100 seats of the Senate were up for election in 2018, and it was our responsibility to show the race as transparently and up to date as possible.

 

 

Brainstorming

 
 

Our first step was to brainstorm how to visually display information in the form of interactive modules that would bring the live election results to readers in real-time.


My primary role entailed exploring layouts, interactive maps, and thinking about different ways to show Democratic and Republican races by state, county, and district in real-time. Later, I also created ads that would guide readers to sign up for our newsletters through engagement from the primary election page.

Some of the questions we started out with:

  1. What is the most important information that people will want to know during election night?

  2. What will people care about viewing?

  3. How do we show that readers and viewers watching the election will have the most relevant and timely information when they want it, but not feel overwhelmed by the choices?

  4. What is the most unbiased way of presenting this information?

  5. What are some ways we can help the audience understand and interact with the election to make them feel like they are part of the process on election night?

  6. Are there interactive modules that we can build for this particular election but then recycle and reuse for future elections?

 
 

 

Information Architecture

 
 

We started organizing information architecture, by splitting the information based on two levels of information. A high-level overview and a detailed level of information.
Four categories for higher level: National Results, State Results, Exit Polls, and Ballot Measures. Ideally, National Results and State Results would feed into each other since State Results is a more granular view of National Results. Exit Polls would not be relevant until the end of the election, and Ballot Measures took their own category.


At a detailed level underneath National and State results, we had subcategories that filtered how the reader would want to view their information – from Senate, House, and Governor.

 
 

 

Data Visualization

 
 

These were some initial module/widget explorations that combined the CNN visual design language and animation to visualize data that we had coming in during election night. We would reuse these for similar types of elections.

Some examples we looked at was New York Time’s needle, following the race closely.

 
 

 

Audience Engagement

 
 

How do we drive audience engagement during election night?

We wanted to come up with a creative way to drive audiences to subscribe to our newsletters during election night. I delegated illustrations to our talented in-house design team, and together we brainstormed ways of visualizing separate CTAs based on the quiz result answers the audience will choose. If a viewer selected the correct answer, they would have the option of subscribing to our political newsletter - "The Point" with Chris Cillizza. If they selected the incorrect answer, they would have the option of subscribing to our general news story newsletter - "5 Things".