Designing for Understanding

Over the course of this project, partnered with Matthew Puentes, Ethan Chang and Jason King, I worked primarily on the “persuasive” component of data representation. During the first class our group looked over a lot of different data sets, and thinking that it would open up some interesting avenues of representation, chose to describe trends in music.

One of the interesting things we identified early about music was that it allowed us to both describe trends over time, as all of the data had some historical information associated with it, but also allowed us to completely ignore time and present information about music completely independent of when it was released.

This lead us in two directions regarding graphical representations, as information-over-time was clearly best communicated in the form of a line graph. For Matt and I, as the group responsible for a persuasive representation, we had to ask ourselves what we could do to present a line graph, the scourge of elementary science classes and clip art of quarterly earnings, in a more interesting way.

Our initial model was more about functionality than any sense of design, as is often the case when it comes to coding projects. Featuring a stark default-white background, and a bright pink iframe in the lefthand of the screen, our first product was by no means pretty. The near-unanimous feedback from our user testing was that our webpage was too sparse, and had some issues communicating its message.

Chief among these issues was a lack of axes, and the sense of scale that they would provide. This was accentuated by the way we scaled the music that our application played. It would start off somewhat quietly, and only increase to a “normal” volume level near the end. The trouble with this was, most people have a hard time hearing the difference between two sounds of a similar volume, so our linearly scaled sound effect wasn’t impacting people the way we wanted it to.

When we explained that the travelling bar correlated to the current volume, and the line graph to the upward trend of music volume, people were receptive to the idea, but we wanted to make changes that would make this understanding more natural, and not reliant on an explanation.

Accompanying a visual reboot that took all of the feedback we had gotten prior into effect, we also made the volume scale more appropriately to the data model, so that the increase in each span was noticeable. When we asked visitors what features they noticed helped with their understanding of the model, most indicated that the min/max points and the axes helped to provide a sense of scale, and what the travelling bar meant.

When we compared our design to those of our other teammates, working on a clear representation of the data set, it became clear that our model provided a narrative, a story to the user that helped to shape their perception. On the other hand, the Clear Perception team’s data model was a lot more straightforward, presented with all of its cards on the table, and with all angles covered, so as to let a user form their own opinion from it instead of giving them a narrative to follow.

Both of these approaches have their value, as it can be useful to try to skew viewer’s opinions when the facts don’t quite show your subject in the way you want, while it can be incredibly powerful when people know you’re showing them the unadulterated facts, and those facts support your stance. I worked on the side of skewing opinions, but having seen the data presented by the other half of my group I believe that both methods are useful, and that for the purpose of skewing perception it is important to stick to a narrative and to take the user on a journey with that narrative such that they come away believing your spin.

Related posts:

If you think you might be tomorrow’s Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, when the deeds of people like Steve Jobs fit your dreams, or the technology lights up the fire in your stomach, there are few things in…

The design objective of this assignment was to create graphics to convey data in two different perspectives. One was to give the unbiased view of the data; the other was intended to persuade the…

As wedding officiants, we’ve got a lot of options when it comes to getting our wedding ceremony script down in black and white. I recommend Google Docs. I’m not going to go into all the particular…