Sunday 8 February 2009

Descry - verb. to discover by looking carefully

Excellant project for data visualisation that i was sent is mix online from micrsoft.
There are a few visualisations there, an intersting one on american presidents first speeches in a treemap.
But the one i have shown here is the obesity epicemic visualisation. i really loved the alternate arrangemtn function of by obesity rate, as it gives a much greater overview for me of the overall obesity epidemic throught the lovely graduated scale of light to dark of red for the density of obesity in each particular state.

size nice idea, but the small would be small and probably reduce legibilitity. the colour graduation works.

i agree with nishant that some poeple want more, answers elaboarted, but an inofgraphics purpose, minimal level of success, is to arouse curiosity about the subject matter at hand.
i assume this extra axis is a way of adding isometric/3d like i saw recently at infoaesthtics where there was a 3d treemap. this might work.

as someone said, the geographic depiction for states is tempting and far easier but would elicit focus on the extremes of the data such 'the south are...'.

i would say as a person with a pathetic knowledge of states in america, the abbreviations to MO for MISSOURI is a good sapce saver, but the key needs to easier to detect as i only just noticed the faint white contrasted to grey for the identification difficult to detect. i like the soft grey, white and pastels but maybe a stronger white/black might be easier.

maybe the small geographic map used as a key for states, not to show the density of obesity for each state, but a basic mouse over (since its interactive) that highlights the state in the key with a single like grey just to make it easier to recognise the state, rather than just the letter links. But this might take it to the 'south are...' still, which you wanted to negate.

overall i liked it and it definetly works to initiate curiousity and is soft on the eye with alternate ways of presenting the data (ascend/descend) & (alpahbet/rate), which i think is extremely useful where possible.

love the project though. will have to rememb to keep checking on your latest and liked the aricle about focus on the question and could tak efrom it even though it 'skim read btw' seemed coding orientated.
very good, thanks nishant.

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