Coronavirus Table
BBC News
BBC News
Visual Journalism Team
Visual Journalism Team
DATA ANALYSIS & DATA JOURNALISM
Will Dahlgreen, Alison Benjamin, John Walton
Will Dahlgreen, Alison Benjamin, John Walton
DESIGN
Irene de la Torre Arenas
Irene de la Torre Arenas
DEVELOPMENT
Development by Marcos Gurgel, Sarah Rainbow, Shilpa Saraf
Development by Marcos Gurgel, Sarah Rainbow, Shilpa Saraf
WORLD SERVICE
Ana Lucía González, Roberto Belo Rovella
Ana Lucía González, Roberto Belo Rovella
Like many news outlets, BBC News is also tracking the Coronavirus pandemic. Our first graphics were mostly maps focusing on how the virus moved from one country to another. However, it soon became evident that geography wouldn’t help us understand how a specific place was doing in terms of controlling it.
And so, heatmaps -and logarithmic line charts- made their way to our screens. We used them to track daily new cases. The strongest the colour, the higher the numbers. The Data Journalism team started doing this type of visual using R (you can check this Medium article if you want to know more about it). But as more countries became part of the list, the need for having an interactive chart also turned more important.
First heatmap representing new cases, done by BBC’s Data Journalism team
Our colleagues at BBC News – Jakarta had already prepared a bubble map with a table that represented the numbers around the world. The central team of which I am part of wanted to build from it: adding the heatmaps for each country while also improving the user experience.
We wanted to make the user experience for mobile as easy as possible. Something that’s a challenge when you’re doing tables. We had already explored vertical and horizontal scrolls in the table for the UK poll tracker with good results. And, therefore, we decided to re-use its approach.
MVP Version for mobile, with horizontal and vertical scroll
MVP Version for desktop
We also wanted to include a filter option in the interactive. With more than 100 countries visualised -and the numbers increasing- adding this option would help users find specific locations. The system, implemented through a dropdown, also allowed to default the table to different zones.
Final version of the table with horizontal and vertical scroll and filter
Like our Coronavirus interactive map, the table had to be easy to translate to the different languages of the BBC News World Services. The Coronavirus Map and Table were the first two projects to be published in all the 40 BBC World Service languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian…
The coronavirus table in different languages
You can see an Observable Prototype done for the project in this link.
