Thematic World Maps in the News: How Effective are They on Smartphones?

Abstract

Thematic world maps are commonly used in online news media, but rarely optimized for mobile devices. Scaling down world maps to fit small screens makes many smaller countries difficult to identify, introducing readability issues and an area bias when reporting global data. We introduce and evaluate map designs addressing two common use cases in this context: A ‘glorified list’ use case, where the map mainly displays data about many countries and a ‘spatial distribution’ use case, where the spatial distribution of population-related phenomena is the focus. For the former, we propose a choropleth map split by continent and scales-up continents with many smaller countries and for the latter, we propose a graduated circle map split into a Western and Eastern hemisphere. In a user study with 333 readers of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), a daily newspaper in Switzerland, we evaluate these novel map designs.