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.