Infographics have gone through quite an evolution over the course of the last few years. In the beginning using pictures in an infographic at all was innovative, but now the Internet is full of them and people are getting bored. These days you have to do something extra to make your infographics standout among the rest. One of the primary ways to do this is through interactive and animated infographics.
Maps Invite People in
One of the primary ways to make interactive infographics these days is with maps. This is because the interactive part is completely intuitive and doesn’t take a lot of effort on the part of the viewer. It also makes each infographic experience unique. If you live in Alaska and you want to know about pollution rates nearby to where you are, you probably don’t care nearly as much what they’re like in New York. There are many sites online that will help you do this such as Stat Silk.
Timelines Help you Focus in
There are also many timeline infographic sites out there as well such as Dipity. The Internet is full of a huge amount of information, and events that occur at different times through history are no exception. People who look at a timeline infographic may be interested in the broad strokes of how something happened, in which case they might only want to stay zoomed out and only read the big events in a huge amount of time. Or, alternatively, they may only care about what particular period in history. By allowing users to focus in at a particular point in a timeline, such as the history of the catholic church, for example, you let them get only the information they want. If a student is doing a project on the Catholic church in the 14th century, for example, then they will only want to focus in at that part of the timeline. If you create a site with a timeline, you can appeal to a much wide swath of people and let them get the info they want without any extra noise. This is exactly what will draw in traffic.
Word Clouds Catch the People’s Attention
Word clouds are animated infographics that let you create size-weighted clouds of words based on any particular subject. So if people want to use their Facebook posts in a word cloud, they can use any site that uses these clouds to make it happen. They tend to be visually striking and very personal, which will always draw people in more than just a long endless essay on anything. Sites like Tagxedo show how this is done to a strong degree.
Overall, the important thing is to make sure that you use interactive infographics appropriate for your situation. If you want a site that’s very serious, a word cloud may not be a good idea. If what you’re doing on your site has very little to do with geographic locations, then a map could just be distracting, for example.