NU Husker football graphic

This graphic ran on the Omaha World Herald’s website on their “Big Red Today” link that covers all Nebraska sports. The graphic doesn’t specify a specific person who created it, but it does say that all information was based on Huskers.com rosters and local reports. It also doesn’t say when this page was created or last updated. The link was on the main Big Red page the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 14, but was moved later that evening when I looked again.

The strength of this piece is its simplicity and easy usability. The text on the left of the graphic does a great job of explaining what the information means, where the information is from and how to use the graphic to find what you want. The color-coding on the map gives viewers a quick idea of the information to be gathered. Another strength of the piece is the fact that you can interact with the map in three different ways: moving around the map, selecting the year, or searching for a name. This way, the graphic doesn’t overwhelm viewers with too much information at one time.

This graphic has so much information that, if done poorly, it would be completely overwhelming and confusing. This graphic is informing viewers about where Husker football players have come from since 1996. It shows that a majority of the players are from Nebraska, but that the Huskers have had football players from most states over the years. If viewers click on a state, they can see a secondary graphic that lists the players’ names, positions, heights, weights, hometowns and the year they began playing for Nebraska. If viewers click on a year, they can see a secondary graphic that shows the map for that year along with a list of the players and their statistics for that year. If you click on a specific player’s name, it even takes you to yet another graphic that shows you statistics and a photo of the player.

I’m not sure there’s much that good be added to this graphic. One thing they don’t have yet (but say they are working on) is adding a biography of each player. It would be nice to see a list of athletic and/or academic awards from high school and college, where they are now and what they are doing, etc.

Any fan of Husker football will find this graphic interesting. I found myself scrolling through states and years, remembering players I had forgotten and comparing heights and weights from some of the players I did remember.

This information graphic is designed very effectively. It is easy to understand and find the mountains of information in this one interactive graphic. Viewers will have no trouble navigating through the information. The usability makes this graphic effective. With the amount of information here, a bad design or bad organization would ruin it. It’s obvious someone who understands “information architecture” designed this interactive information graphic.