Go to the interactive story “All the Ways to Make Bubble Tea, Taiwan’s Pearl-fect Drink”
Interactive make-your-own-drink bubble tea adventure built in collaboration with dataviz developer Julia Janicki. This is the first of a series of data-driven visuals as part of the “Taiwan data stories”, a passion project initiated by Julia and me to expand visual storytelling in the Asian community. We chose bubble tea as our first topic in hopes of using a relatable topic as a friendly stepping stone for more in-depth topics we want to explore in the future.
We explored many possibilities of what to focus on in terms of topic, such as the controversial origin of the bubble tea, trends in popularity over time, or the density of bubble tea stores across Taiwan, but nothing really felt that original. Then we realized what’s most interesting for us is the limitless customizations possible given the diverse ingredients and drinks, and that there are countless more flavors and toppings in Taiwan than we ever see abroad. This made us curious: exactly how many unique boba drinks are there in Taiwan?
Data analysis and exploration
For the data, we selected the top five most popular drink stores in Taiwan as of Feb 2021, based on data from data66 who used Google Trends data, and listed all the drinks across these stores. We then started distilling the data to find only the unique drinks. This turned out to be much more challenging to untangle than we anticipated, as each store has different categorization systems. After much exploration, we developed six main categories (milk tea, pure tea…), then broke them down further into components (base 1, base 2, milk, flavor, texture), with different combinations of components leading to 157 unique drinks.
With the cleaned data, a hierarchical format seemed most appropriate. Using D3, Julia rearranged the tabular data into hierarchical data, and drew a visualization that has such a layout. The boba tree was born!
Visual design
When Julia showed me the boba trees, I immediately saw the curvy lines as flows of tea ingredients all cascading and colliding into the final product. I was also inspired by Wendy MacNaughton’s illustrations of kitchen shelves in the book Salt Fat Acid Heat, and integrated boba store equipment for each node.
Narrative design
To create a story experience, it was important to also provide background and cultural context. For us, the most interesting part of boba is the experience of customizing the drink. I thought it would be fun to have our users experience the joy of building their own tea. Through a step-by-step drink ordering experience, we introduced the Taiwanese unique tea culture, local ingredients and texture preferences, beliefs in “warm” temperature drinks for good health, as well as folding in recent environmental efforts to reduce single-use plastics. In the end, the audience will be rewarded by enjoying their very own customized virtual drink out of 12,775,875 combinations.
Below is the initial sketch.
Make your own virtual boba at interactive story “All the Ways to Make Bubble Tea, Taiwan’s Pearl-fect Drink”
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