Project 4: Designing Information for Quick Understanding

Project Brief: We live in a world of big data. The world needs more ways to make sense of data, identify numbers that matter, and make meaning about them relative to the task at hand. In this project, you will develop an online dashboard that displays weather and personal data. You will create a single, non-scrolling, non-interactive information display that helps a particular user process and understand information at a glance, with minimal interaction. Your work will be guided by a competitive analysis of a range of dashboards and visualizations that are currently available for corporations and commercial products.

One of the first exercises we did was to define the variables we would be looking at and create an editorial assertion. For me, I spent the month of March collecting data on how many steps I took, how many hours I spent on TikTok, and the weather outside. A simple analysis of the data revealed that as the weather got better later on in the month, I spent less time on Tiktok and more time walking outside, which made sense.

The next step was to figure out how to visualize the data and the assertion in a clear and compelling way. We started out by doing some simple physical visualization exercises, in which I played with ways to represent a week using sour patch kids.

I really liked this method of displaying data and found it to have a tactile quality that’s nearly impossible to replicate digitally. One thing I wished was that I had more materials to create more abstract/interesting comparisons.

The next exercise we worked on involved creating a postcard to send to a person so we could test how readable our sketched visualizations were. My graphs were fairly simple, but the hardest thing was figuring out how to convey each variable in a consistent way that made comparisons clear, but each of my variables used different units since they measured different things. Here are some of my sketches and postcard:

For my final dashboard, I moved to a digital format. In my sketches, I mainly used color to differentiate variables, but it was hard to read without a key, so I decided to experiment with form as well. In an initial draft of the visualization, I decided to just compare TikTok screen time with steps taken:

From this simple graph, I think my editorial assertion started to get more clear, but I was still having trouble figuring out how to add the weather data. I decided on using a simple background with color to indicate how warm or cold it was that day:

Things are starting to look clearer! My main comments I received from my peers was that adding a key along with dates would be helpful.

I also felt that it was a little underwhelming to only see a week’s worth of data, not to mention I had data from the whole month of March that I still had yet to touch. At the same time, I didn’t want to muck up the dashboard by adding too much information that could be confusing. As a result, I decided to implement an interactive visualization that would let one see more general data for the whole month, but also allow someone to zoom in on a specific week. I also wanted to refine the actual graphs themselves since some of the bright reds and blues felt a little awkward to me on the dark-toned background.

So for my final, one can see data from each week of March on the right (with the option to change months at the top) and select a single week to understand some of the more quantitative data. I also made the decision to have the colorful bars that indicated the weather to change height to make the graphs more readable from a distance.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the way it came out. I think the biggest things I learned from this project was to not overthink or try to force the data into a type of visualization that it doesn’t want to be in. Rather, I let the data speak to me and started off with simple comparisons to make sure my editorial assertion stayed clear.