OverviewFinal Project
Overview
This is a 2-person team Project: Designing and
implementing a prototype of an interactive visualization for
multidimensional data. .
Remember, the point of the project is NOT to try to solve an analytics problem. Imagine yourselves as hired to help domain experts solve their problems with visualization. WHat kinds of support do you need to provide?
Here are some considerations to keep in mind.
- You will almost certainly not be able to present all the data with any complex data set, so you will need to decide the audience and the goals of your visualization. Justify your design choices and identify who and what the visualization(s) is designed to serve. For example, if you were to choose a project considering whether Uber should come to Vancouver , are your users city planners? consumers? taxi cabs? economists? etc.
- You are not constrained to a single view; in fact, complex data will typically benefit from more than a single representation, but how you decide to manage the data views is dependent on your design. You might rely on a suite of interaction techniques (details on demand, anyone?) , or use linked views.
All of your assignments can build towards your final project.
Project proposal: in class Feb 28.
Your project proposal will consist of a one-page summary document and a 7-8 minute presentation of your proposaed project idea. The point is for us to give you feedback, suggest directions, and help you clarify your scope. Read the general requirements for the project here, and then tell us about the following:
- What is the problem or area that you are addressing? Be as specific as you can without predetermining the solution. For example, saying "we are going to look at ridesharing patterns" is too broad. Saying "we want to explore the impact of ride sharing on the taxi industry in City X" is very appropriate.
- Briefly describe audience(s)/user group(s). What is their anticipated level of data and vis lliteracy/experience?
- What are the data you will be using?
- What are some of your visualization ideas?
Data: We have ensured that there are open data avaialble for the topics we suggested. You are encouraged to choose something of interest to you, so you may use other datat, but your project scopemust be sufficiently complex: that is, there must be dimensional complexity (too many dimensions to show in one simple view) and enough scale (size of data set). There are many data sets out there, come to me and Ankit if you want some pointers about where you might find some. Your project must draw data from more than one dataset.
One example of an open data set is the Vancouver Parking Ticket Data. You can look at many governments, police and fires services, and international institutions such as the World Bank, UN or WHO for open data. Google is your friend here.
Project Reports
Each part of the project will include a deliverable report that details what the relevant parts of your code do, design choices you made and why (for visual mappings) and any problems you have had with the code. (This means we can evaluate your marks even if the code does not run. Be prepared for those horrible last minute bugs.)
Details required for each assignment-specific aprt of the report are laid out in the assignment.
The format of the reports for the individual parts is up to you, but
it should be professionally prepared, expressive, grammatically sound,
illustrative of your efforts and process, and easy to understand. A
good design effort can easily be hampered by a poor communication of
what was done.
Advice on how to make a good Visualization:
- Think effiicient. Most visualizations we have seen in the class involve a large team of designers and implementers. You need to design a small project.
- Learn the Libraries available for you to use or extend. Whatever language you choose, there are probably already libraries out there in solving little problems that you will face along the way. Please feel free to use them.
- Read Pre-Cooked Data files of real data. It is perfectly acceptable for you to grab data from somewhere and handcraft a data file that is easy for your program to read
- Sit Properly. Now you think I'm joking, eh? I'm not. If you happen to put in marathon sessions working on your project, think hard about what you're doing to your hands and back. Take frequent breaks. Sit correctly. You will never get that dream job if you have no hands left. Please read the Typing Injuries FAQ.
Part 4 - Final Written Submission
Components of your Submission:
Demo: make sure the code is runnable from somewhere or in some form, and either include a link to or a zip file of the running application. Some points to remember about your vis:
- use the correct visual form for data type
- use brushing and linking when you have related views (data points related by a selected attribute are shown/highlighted in both views);
- devote your efforts to DATA visualization as opposed to marketing or branding kinds of elements.
Code: Hand in the code you have developed by this point.
Report: Write a report that describes the Visualization approach that you took, and briefly explains your code. You should include a brief "user manual" section that explains how to use any interaction techniques. You should also include a report of a brief "feasiblity pilot" you run with one or two people who will use your prototype. In this initial pilot your users may identify issues with your design or suggest things that could have been useful. YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO IMPLEMENT THESE but you are expected to report them in your final document - see (4) below.
In your report, be sure to show screenshots that illustrates your work. Here are the basic points you should cover:
- Give an overview of the visualization and what it is meant to serve. Who is your audience? What kinds of questions are you proposing the visualization will address?
- Describe your data set(s). What are the data dimensions ? Make sure you identify the types, because you should justify your design decisions.
- Explain how to use the interactions.
- If there are things you wanted to get into the working demo but could not, add a section on unimplemented sections of the design. Be brief but include a visual. This should also include parts of your vis that you wanted to get working or vis elements that do not render quite correctly - explain what you wanted to do, how what you did almost got there.
Your project will be graded on:
Completeness of your interactive visualization
Completeness of your report
Quality of your writing
You can find recommendations on how to write a good report here.
Personal Contribution Writeup
In addition to the Final Demo, each team member must separately turn in one page describing that person's individual contribution. We are primarily interested in a detailed description of which parts of the code and design you were responsible for.
Submit the individual report on CAnvas separately from the final report.