Introduction
This project is mainly about different methods of presenting data and creating data visualization for users to understand the data better. Designs are divided into two parts. One of them is to present data as simple as possible with different graphs and charts, the other one is to present in a story-telling or more creative way. Both of them will be displayed in the following sections in more details. We chose the data set of 2000 billionaires around the world and generated four direct charts and one interactive chart. Information about their wealth, age, the region they from and their source of wealth are included in the presentation.
Initial Design & Prototyping
Database choice
Our data was chosen from CORGIS Dataset Project, the Billionaire JSON Library. This library contains three data sets of billionaires collected on 1998, 2004 and 2014. In order to make the most updated data, we chose the set of 2014. The database consists the following arbitrary columns: personal info including gender, age, wealth, location, year, name, wealth source; info about the company: company sector, company type, company name, relationship with the company, company location, country code, political influenced.
Design Process
Our brainstorm sheet
At the beginning stage, we came up an idea of building up an interactive world map. Using different shading and 3D logos to represent different data. We soon facing great challenges on coding the map. We had to switch to a different plan. One of my teammates had experience in data visualization. So with his help, we successfully created the version we had it now. We found brainstorm at this stage is extremely efficient, as shown in the picture, each of us came up with different types of graphs provided us multiple choices and inspirations.
User Testing
During our user testing, we first let them play around with our prototype. We had a lot of positive feedback on the idea of a dynamic data tree, but it was really confusing since we didn’t make it clear about what branches and nodes represent.
So as you can see in the picture, I have to explain to the users so they can understand the display better. On the other hand, our direct graphs were really clear and users were able to understand it immediately. As shown in the graphs below, we can see obvious patterns with a couple of extreme cases. We chose different colors to represent data in the simplest way with a decent efficiency.
The last graph is our storytelling one. We designed a disk that displays all the names of the 200 billionaires with their source of wealth shown in a bracket outside of the disk. However, this design has flaws needs to be fixed. Names are all jammed together, and some features are still pretty confusing for first time user.