Why NBCU redesigned election coverage as a rich interactive experience
Scooping Gold in The Drum Awards for Design, is Design Interaction winner Code and Theory and NBC News Group with Powering the Future of Data Journalism. Here is the award-winning case study.
How do you deliver fair, accurate, and up-to-date news during a national election? NBCU's Big Board has proven the ultimate co-host, painting a clear picture of the political landscape for innovation and accuracy across the network. The team architected The Big Board through a design system that ensures millions of viewers receive consistently credible data across six networks. It was developed through more than a year of rigorous quality assurance testing and leveraged AI to simulate endless election scenarios across eight apps — all in real-time.
The board also needed to be able to project what’s next in an era of pervasive uncertainty amid a highly charged election session. Achieving this task required creating gamified capabilities integrating what-if scenarios and real-time updates into the narrative. The Big Board knows how that will most likely play out.
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) launched on November 15, 1926, making it the oldest broadcasting network in the United States. Almost 100 years later, NBC News is breaking barriers, tapping into innovative technology and cutting-edge design to reimagine the Big Board and political coverage at large.
The idea for The Big Board was simple to say, and impossibly complex to deliver: Create the nation’s most advanced, data-driven storytelling platform. Offer compelling, up-to-second election data as fast as possible with zero errors tolerated. Anchors are empowered to deliver visual, data-driven stories seamlessly to millions during intense political moments. Merging data strategy with dynamic broadcasting capabilities, the Big Board swiftly illuminates factual data — ingested, verified, and available within 4 seconds from 16,000 U.S. geographies down to the county level.
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Most of all, the board is the perfect "dance partner" for hosts during election coverage. In fact, the Big Board was developed by researching how NBC News and MSNBC’s National Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki, the nation’s leading data analyst, interacted with data and behaved under stress. Today, the Big Board anticipates Kornacki’s needs as an on-air correspondent to better translate complex election data into an understandable, interactive visual spectacle as the news unfolds.
NBCU News Group developed The Big Board with two key audiences in mind: the handful of anchors utilizing the tool (led by Steve Kornacki) and more than 20 million engaged audience members on and offline. Display modes and apps, customizing types, colors and graphics can be easily manipulated to reflect the speaker and the channel, giving the audience a clear, consistent data presentation, no matter where they are watching.
Its scalable architecture ensures customization across NBCU News Group’s top platforms in English and Spanish, including multiple networks (NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo), NBC News NOW’s streaming and the “Kornacki Cam” YouTube stream.
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Executing the technical craft of the Big Board was a multi-dimensional feat over more than a year. The teams created a framework to unify the Big Board’s data and visual systems into a seamless experience. This integration involved advanced data modeling, system integration, and security safeguards. A first-of-its-kind caching strategy was implemented to enable instant load times for complex maps, allowing hosts to smoothly zoom in and out of regions with real-time speed and precision. The mapping strategy was also enhanced to improve performance and expand NBCU News Group’s capabilities, using a single codebase across multiple broadcast graphic teams.
The infrastructure, supported by eight app modules and extensive AI-aided QA, efficiently manages 56 datasets for varying election types across all NBCU News Group platforms. It took a year of trial and error to achieve zero errors.
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The impact for viewers at home, for Kornacki and various hosts, as well as those managing the Big Board has been a testament to the power of data-driven journalism, technology and creativity:
• Zero errors in 5,000-plus broadcast hours
• +218% social mentions for Steve Kornacki and the Big Board (6.9M impressions 2024)
• 12M viewers across the 2024 primary season
• +23% followers on NBC News YouTube Channel/Kornacki Cam (9.2M Followers)
• :04 Seconds to ingest, verify and deliver data from anywhere in the country to the Big Board live on air. The fastest, most accurate data storytelling platform today.
• 10M+ data points from 16 years of electoral data and results at Steve Kornacki’s fingertips at any time during the broadcast
• 16,356 geographies across the U.S. are managed by the Big Board concurrently
• 5K hours spent unifying complex mapping technology for broadcast TV distribution
• 250X faster application data load time to handle breaking news
• The fastest on-air data-mapping tool in production, with over 100FPS rendering
• 8 Big Board apps, all built and managed in a single codebase
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