Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

Chapter 08 Thinking Small

Until now, the smallest screen you have considered has still been a screen. In this chapter, you’re going to shrink the available real estate even further and begin your data visualization development at an even more basic level: the user without a screen. You’ll learn to build API-first, rather than mobile-first, in order to create the most efficient, communicative representation of your data. From there, you’ll be able to work with discrete, efficient data sets which you can group and layer to create effective visualizations.

Designing for the Smallest Canvas: No Canvas

Now that you have spent some time at the 40,000-foot view, in this chapter you will focus on some actual implementation details. Just as you have done in previous chapters, you should begin by considering the most limited user.

In the discussion about responsive design, that most limited user was someone working on a small screen on a bad network. And intuitively, that makes sense. You are designing visible layouts to be consumed by humans. The lower limit of that would, naturally, be something with which a human could interact.

Throughout this book, I’ve waxed poetic about the importance of developing for the smallest screen as your base user—and that’s still a good precept to adhere to.

Note Recall that data is collected from an operational environment. It is strictly raw findings and is perfectly concrete. Through processing and exploitation, data is distilled into information, ...