Creating a Bar Chart with Object States - Part 2

Part 1:

In a previous video lesson, we went over how to create a graph using animations and hotspots. Now, we’re going to create an interactive chart using Object States. While it’s perfectly acceptable to apply interactions to Hotspots, applying States to objects or groups of objects is just another way to create engaging content— and it can save you time by eliminating a few steps! If you haven’t played around with Object States yet, it may be helpful to view our Video Lesson on Object States prior to watching this lesson. 

As you can see, in this final experience, we have a chart that you can interact with to view data from two different years. For today’s lesson, we’re going to build this chart from scratch.

Let’s begin by creating a small square shape for our first bar. This is going to be the default state of our first bar, so let’s change the fill color to be a purple and black gradient. Now, with the Square shape selected, click the plus sign next to States to set this as our default state. We’ll add a standard transition to ensure the state change is smooth. Now, click the drop down and select Add new state to create a new state for this square. This will be State 1. With State 1 highlighted, we’ll add a standard transition, and change the size of our square to represent the data for the year 2020. Now, let’s repeat that process for State 2. Click the dropdown, select Add New State, and a standard transition. We’ll resize the square shape for state 2 to represent that data for the year 2019. To create 3 more bars, copy and paste the square shape 3 times and align and distribute them equally. Now, you can select each bar individually and edit the height of the bar for State 1 and State 2 to represent varied data. Feel free to get creative here and customize the states for each bar however you’d like. 

Once you’re finished customizing your bars, make sure to select each of the 4 bars, group them together, and in the design tab check off “Use Group as Trigger.” This will enable us to change the states of each bar by targeting the group. You can see if we click the drop down and hover over State 1 and State 2, we can preview the different states for our bars.

Now that we’ve customized the various states for each bar in our graph, we need to create our 2019 and 2020 buttons that will trigger the changes in our graph. We can start by adding a small square shape on the canvas with a textbox that says 2020 above it. 

We’re going to “Add New States” for both the text box and square shape below it. So we’ll go ahead and add a new state to the text box just like we added new states in the previous step. We’ll want to make sure we add a transition, and for the new state we’re going to change the color of the text box to white. Once we’re done adding our new state to the text box, we can add a new state for the square shape as well. Only this time we’re going to change the fill color from green to purple, and we’ll transform the square shape into a circle by changing the dimensions to 80 by 80, and rounding the corners by 80 pixels.

Now, group the text box and square shape together; and we’ll label this group in the layers panel as “2020 button”. Make sure to check the box that says “use group as trigger”. From here, we can make a copy of this button and change the text to say 2019. There, we now have all of our states setup, and in the next video we’ll walk through how to add the interactions to trigger these object states to change.

Part 2

Building off of the interactive graph from the previous video, we’re going to add customized hover interactions to our buttons to reveal data for a specific year. As you can see in the final experience, when you hover over each year, it reveals a new set of data.

Let’s select the 2020 button group, and navigate to the interaction tab. You’ll notice that since we chose “Use Group as Trigger” in a previous step, a few interactions have already been automatically applied. We are going to edit these interactions to create our own custom effects.

Let’s start by editing the existing  “on Hover” interaction by clicking the down arrow next to the interaction. For the action we’ll use “change target state,” and from the list below, make sure the 2020 button group is selected. From the dropdown, select State 1 as the target state. Also, we’ll want to deselect  “lock state” and click update interaction to save our changes.

The next thing we’ll want to do is update our interactions for the bars in our chart. Click the down arrow next to the on-click interaction to change the trigger to ‘Hover’. For this on hover interaction, we’ll change the target state to the bars group. Select State 1 as the target state, and toggle off lock state before clicking update. 

Now, try running through the same process for the 2019 button. This time around,  make sure to select State 2 when changing the target state of the bars folder. Once you’ve finished, go ahead and look at the preview to see if your interactions work as intended.