UX Design and Data Visualization

We have been looking at the topic of data visualization this week in my UX design immersive course at General Assembly. We have been tasked with finding a web page that uses data visualization and then providing a review of that page. For this assignment I have chosen to look at the CNN Money landing page located here:

CNNMoney - Business, financial and personal finance news

Current market data reads across the top of the landing page, while most active stocks are displayed in a right hand column. It effectively gives viewers a very quick snapshot of current performance and allows them to select “See all” to view more details.

I appreciate that it displays the current market status in an abbreviated form. As a result the design doesn’t use up any unnecessary screen real estate, but gives readers a very quick snapshot of what is going on at that moment. It uses triangles and color to indicate whether a stock or market is currently up or down, and invites readers to “See all” if they are interested in digging deeper into the data.

I can’t say for sure if I would change anything about this design. I like that it is very simple and easy to read. I pulled a screen capture of the page into Photoshop to view how it might look to someone with a form of color-blindness, and — while many of the colors don’t translate very well — it is still easy to understand with the triangles indicating up or down.

Perhaps if I watched the stock market for business reasons I might have suggestions for what to change. As someone not very familiar with the stock market, I think it is a very effective design and method for visualizing this data.