NewsNation 2024 Election Mapping System
I designed a series of visual designs for an interactive mapping system used for NewsNation's on-air election coverage. The screens include live and historical election results at the national, statewide, and county/district levels, delegate counts, votes remaining, predictions for the general elections, and census data.
I worked closely with a team of developers at Decision Desk HQ to make sure my designs translated into a custom app that the anchors use on a tablet to control the screens.
Client: NewsNation/DDHQ
Role: Lead Designer
Tools: Figma, Github
Live on-air use
Screen Designs
User Flow
I began by researching similar on-air mapping systems used across different networks.
The system for NewsNation uses a much bigger screen than many competitors and is also run by a custom app that the anchors control through a tablet device instead of touchscreen.
But the core features of candidate info, voting data, and maps are similar.
In order to ensure smooth transitions between data and map changes, I worked with the development team to map out a user flow for the anchors.
This helped us determine how many screens we needed and how many levels an anchor could click through to display the data differently (national, statewide, and district/count).
Colors
For the Primaries especially, the biggest color challenge was having an expansive enough palette to cover the amount of candidates without compromising contrast and map visibility.
For example, during our testing we learned certain pinks and oranges did not display well on TV and also did not have enough contrast with the reds we were using.
NewsNation also wanted to use a blue background on the wall, so that limited our options as well.
The final colors account for all of these constraints and accessibility requirements like providing enough contrast on the maps.
