Tuesday, January 19, 2016

electionbettingodds.com will annoy you



electionbettingodds.com is a great idea, but with haphazard execution. The website uses data from an online betting site to calculate the implied percentage likelihood that presidential candidates will win the United States presidency as well as their party's nomination. Betting odds tend to be better at predicting outcomes than polling, which makes the site's content interesting and helpful. However, electionbettingodds.com will annoy you for the following reasons:
  • While the blue and red column shadings are a nice touch, the lack of shading in the rightmost column gives the page an unbalanced look.
  • The numbers don't add up, which might lead you to question how reliable the data actually is. This is a major flaw in a site whose whole point is to communicate data. For example, if you add up the percentage likelihood of the three democratic candidates, you get 96.5%. However, there is a 100% chance that a democrat will in the democratic primary, so something must be wrong with the data. Similarly, if you add up the percentage likelihood for the republican primary and the presidency, you get 98.1% and 98.9%, respectively.
  • The column headings are not centered.
  • The format of the column headings is just bold and underlined, which looks unprofessional.
electionbettingodds.com will give you some useful information about how the upcoming elections are likely to play out, but the website's experience could be greatly enhanced by fixing the flaws mentioned above. You may want to love this site, but I bet these design flaws will annoy you.

2 comments:

  1. Completely agree with you. Seems like it could be quite informative, but it looks like a website from the 1990s.

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  2. It's called margin-of-error--this should be obvious, but it cases it not you should read the FAQ.

    The headers are in fact centered (look at the source and inspect the page). You'll see that below each header are two columns and the center point of those two columns is at the center of the header. So it's not that the headers that aren't centered, but rather the content below them that appears that way (the percentages are much larger than the circles with the images). The smaller your screen/window the better they look; the imperfections become more "apparent" as your window gets larger.

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