Interactive Survey Results

Team

DESIGN Lily Boyce, Sathya Lakshmipathy

DEVELOPMENT Ishita Tiwari, Raagul Nagendran, Lily Boyce, Danielle Carrick

TEAM LEAD Danielle Carrick

PITCHFORK LEAD Ryan Kincaid

Objective

For Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary Reader’s Poll, create an interactive feature that increases time spent and generates excitement.

Problem

While Pitchfork is known for assertive album reviews and opinionated ranked lists, it also regularly surveys its readers for their own listening preferences. Generally, the format for showing these survey results had been a static list of the top-voted albums and songs with no additional information from the survey.

But survey data is always more nuanced than top-line takeaways, and the whole point of this feature is to put the reader in the editorial driver’s seat for a change. How could we focus the results more on the voters and help them to see themselves in the survey?

Data

SURVEY RESULTSTop 200 albums, ranked

SUPPORTING METADATAgenre, artist, year, album art

SURVEY DEMOGRAPHICSage, gender, queer-identifying, location

Approach

With so many ways to combine and visualize the data available, a narrative was necessary to pull the reader through the story and keep the data relevant. An early approach relied too heavily on letting the user explore the data on their own, which might lead to initial overwhelm and a shorter page visit. Moving on from that idea, I created a scrollytelling outline of four sections:

The Music - an intro celebrating the overall landscape of reviews at Pitchfork in the last 25 years
The List - the meat of the content, the actual survey results of the top 200 albums
The People - highlighting the differences in top albums based on the voters
For You - an interactive filtered list for the reader to explore the data on their own

We used a scrollytelling format with interactive d3 visualizations in each section.

Early Concept

Final Design

Metrics

30% increase in time spent over previous year-end survey article

70% of users scrolled to the end of the page

Outcome

The list was well received both internally at Condé Nast and externally by readers and artists alike (Fleet Foxes and The National reposted the graphics to their instagram pages! 🤩). The metrics speak for themselves - it was a hit. This framework became the basis for three subsequent Readers’ Poll iterations over the next two years, which saw increased reader engagement by as much as 30% versus the previous static article format.

From Reader’s Polls adapted for Best of 2022 and Best of the 1990s

The 200 Best Albums of the Last 25 Years

Lily Boyce

About

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