Design Critique: Interactive Visualization

Assignment Instructions: Find an interactive visualization that provides complex analysis and is well done.

Investigate:

1. Is it interactive - can the user meaningfully change the presentation of the data, or the visual encodings, or otherwise steer what is presented to them?  In other words, no infographics or static visualizations for this design critique.  

2. Is it a data visualization - we aren't looking for user interfaces, but rather for visual presentation of data in an interactive format.

3. It is interesting or complex enough to talk about for a design critique - probably a simple bar chart won't be quite interesting enough to discuss in a presentation.  Look for visualizations with interesting visual or interaction design choices or novel approaches to presenting data, or novel data that is challenging to visually represent. 

Data Collection & Extraction Process

The data was taken from ATUS Extract builder where the analyst can set the conditions/filters in which they need from the entire database. Once you click "retrieve data" it populated an excel sheet of the tabular data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Example below. (https://www.bls.gov/tus/database.htm)

Hours of the Day Broken Down

Data Visualization

Tracked Findings

Design Choices

Effective Design Choices

• Color Coded by category​

• Color transitions based on current activity​

• Creating a “Travelling” category and placing it in the center​

• Graph shape being circular​

• Simulation pace is fixed in 3 modes – user choice based on what they are looking for​

• Key Times/Phases of the day – the subtitle text below the time provides an “analyzed” trend for that period

Limitations

• User Actions are restrictive to simulation speed

• Visualizations are 1 view at a time (cannot see the data overlaid/overall)

• Lack of filtering to understand data trends more than just activities (gender, age, occupation)

  • Consolidating all visualization

Recommended Areas of Improvement

• Put all visualizations in 1 view (dashboard-like)

• Apply filters to all visuals at once

• Have a "tracking" mode to see the trends like seen in the findings section

Interesting Find....

While looking at the webpage and interactive visualization. I found the author provided a supplementary simulation, analyzing work days of jobs that are "9-5" structured. Overlapping this data with the average day in the life helped provide more insight to some of the "anomalies" seen in the day schedule.