Reviewing the analytics for letsfreecongress.org today, one pair of statistics really stood out to me.

The site had about 13,000 visits over its first two days, with roughly 30% of the visit coming from mobile/tablet devices, and the rest from “desktop” devices. The difference in bounce rate between desktop and mobile is stark. For desktop visits, the bounce rate is roughly 10%. The bounce rate for mobile visits is close to 85%.

I knew there would be a difference, but I was not expecting the difference to be so drastic. The site was designed to be a desktop first experience, with its heavy and large interactive graphics. The mobile experience is a fallback, and not a very graceful one at that. All the datavis animations that makes the site great is missing.

The trend on the web is that more and more traffic will be on mobile and tablets. The question for me becomes, how do we design datavis pieces for the mobile that converts just as well? What does interactive datavis on mobile devices even look like?