Author: sapthami11shetty

An American invention, breakfast cereal began as a digestive aid, acquired religious overtones, became a sugary snack and now toggles between health food and sweet indulgence. Throughout that history, it has mirrored changes in the world beyond the breakfast table. Cold cereals are an easy, convenient food for busy people. Many boast impressive health claims, or try to promote the latest nutrition trend.

But are these cereals really as healthy as they claim to be?

These products are NOT always healthy just because they have small amounts of whole grains in them. These are highly processed foods that are loaded with added sugars. Small amounts of whole grains do not negate the harmful effects of the other ingredients. If you must eat breakfast cereal, make sure to read the ingredients list and be wary of front label health claims. Choose cereals that are high in fiber and low in sugar.

Data show that consuming commercial breakfast cereals can increase overall nutrient intake and lead to a healthier weight – when compared to those who skip breakfast. It’s hard to conclude much from studies on eating cereal and body weight, due to the multitude of other factors. Most of us can acknowledge that a majority of cereals are edible entertainment. Cereal consumption usually has little to do with nutrition and a lot to do with advertising, characters, images, and convenience. A look at this visualization can help us make better decisions next time we are shopping for breakfast cereals.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/mike.pullen#!/vizhome/Cerealdata_0/Dashboard1

What I like about the visualization

Visualization is simply and functional: Represents the key nutrition criteria you should pay attention to, based on the big three—sugar, salt and fiber. Healthy cereal is the one with high fiber (4g or more) and low sugar (10 g or less) and low sodium (140mg or less).

Visualization makes it easy to contrast and compare the various options available: Cereal is big business. Each new cereal production technique is a marketing strategy. This visualization make it easy to compare the various options and make a wise decision based on the ingredients the contain.

What I did not like about it

The visualization is not very insightful: There are many cereal brands making lots of types of cereal. Today cereals contain everything from sugary morsels to healthy flakes, to Frosted Flakes and so on. You get to be the one to who decides which one to choose among the various options available. The visualization could accommodate more factors into consideration rather than just the considering the sugar salt and fiber contents.  Details regarding calories, proteins, fat, carbohydrate    etc. could be provided to make it more detailed.

The visualization lacks the Aesthetics: The choice of colors to represent the cross mark and the tick mark on the graph is appropriate and well understood but the visualization is not eye catchy or does not stand out.

Audience consideration: Companies use bright colors, cartoon characters and action figures to attract children’s attention. Not surprisingly, this causes children to associate breakfast cereals with entertainment and fun, making them the major consumers of breakfast cereals. It is necessary that the graph be understandable and interpretable by children to help them make wise decision when they would be shopping for breakfast cereals.

Choosing the right graph: The Graph represent 3 major factors against which the visualization is based. Sodium content is associated with X axis and Fiber with the Y axis. It is not clear how the 3^rd component is mapped into the graph. Choice of any other form of graph would be better representation for the data in hand.

How it can be made better

Designing the visualization with consideration to other components: The following visualization shows the various components for every breakfast cereal under consideration.Increase the aesthetic component by incorporating different colors: And increase the  usability of the visualization by using the right form of graphs.

Redesigning :

https://us-east-1.online.tableau.com/#/site/sapthami/workbooks/67835/views

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A9_QY_VtbbJtOC-9mJurN7QbMcUlfOygA3WamkSdinU/edit

 

references:

http://andrewmartineau.com/whats-the-best-breakfast-cereal

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-breakfast-cereals

https://authoritynutrition.com/are-breakfast-cereals-healthy/

There was an estimate of 3.5 billion internet users worldwide in 2016. This means about 45 percent of the global population accessed the internet that year. The majority of global internet users are located in East and South Asia, while China is the largest online market in the world. In 2016, China had over 721 million internet users, more than double the amount of third-ranked U.S. with nearly 290 million internet users. India ranked second in number of users; Brazil and Japan complete the top 5. English is the most common language on the internet by share of users, followed by Chinese and Spanish.

The previous class we spoke about how aesthetics and the look and feel of the dashboard are important and how it is even more important to convey the critical information to the audience in a way they can understand it easily. Aesthetics are an important element of dashboard design but to be effective a designer must first take the time to explore three key points: the purpose of the dashboard, who their audience is, and how they will use it.

Let’s look at the following visualization.

Visualization link:

https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_2647_Global_Internet_Usage_By_the_Numbers_n.jpg

What is good about this visualization

The visualization is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, provides a greater context of information and some rich comparisons.

This visualization represents an amalgamation of graphs which are beautifully represented in vibrant colors and captures the audience.

The visualization supports the overall claim of internet worldwide by giving us details of the increase in worldwide internet users, regional distribution of internet users worldwide, segments in internet traffic and internet traffic contributed by mobile users.

What can be changed…

who is the audience?: It is better to understand who are you designing it for. It is important that we take into consideration the user’s tech savviness so that we can implement some UI elements that are common or known to the audience. The first graph in the visualization, it would take the viewers some time to associate the various components and make sense out of the graph.

Needs to be intuitive: Labeling of metrics can be done in a better way.  Adding clear, concise labels to the visualization and maintain uniform text font throughout thus removing any cognitive barriers.

https://www.statista.com/chart/7246/the-countries-with-the-fastest-internet/

Option to drill down: the graph that represents the regional distribution of internet users worldwide could accommodate information on other continents and also provide country wise information on internet usage on drilling down so as to keep the visualization simple at the same time accommodate as much information as possible.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/249562/number-of-worldwide-internet-users-by-region/

Story Telling and flow in visualization: The visualization depicts a story connecting various aspects of internet worldwide but would make more sense if the various graphs were for the same year making it easier for comparison and contract the graphs.

 

Conclusion:

Understanding the various data visualization options and redesigning and incorporating the above-mentioned changes will make the visualization better.

Since dashboards often express dense information and visualizations that are imperative to an organization’s success; good visual design implemented in a dashboard needs to be clear, practical, and elicit proper emotional responses.

 

References:

https://www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/ux/archive/2015/03/06/user-center-dashboards-a-visual-design-approach.aspx

https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/whitepapers/dashboards-for-financial-services.pdf

https://www.geckoboard.com/blog/dashboard-design-what-makes-an-effective-kpi-dashboard/#.WRZh_Wjyu00

Once upon a time in America, students paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

From January 2006 to July 2016, the Consumer Price Index for college tuition and fees increased 63 percent, compared with an increase of 21 percent for all items. Competition is one reason. As schools wanted to attract top-tier students, the costs of hiring brand-name faculty members, building expensive facilities, and offering comfortable student amenities all add up. All these factors combined produce headache-inducing tuition rates at both private and public universities.

The following visualization shows the average in state tuition and fees for one year full time study at a public four-year institution from 2005/06 to 2015/16 for different American states.

Best way to analyze data is through data visualizations. Data visualization turns numbers and letters into aesthetically pleasing visuals, making it easy to recognize patterns and find exceptions.

We understand and retain information better when we can visualize our data. With our decreasing attention span, and because we are constantly exposed to information, it is crucial that we convey our message in a quick and visual way. Patterns or insights may go unnoticed in a data spreadsheet. But if we put the same information on a chart, the insights become obvious.

So  what’s good about this visualization?

• The dashboard incorporates a significant amount of data, making it easy to compare and convey the matrix in the context.
• The dashboard has a flow structure which effectively incorporates user to view data based on time scales such as year and identify the trend year after year.

What can be changed

• Too much data, too close together – this dashboard doesn’t have enough room to breathe, giving users data overload. It’s also poorly structured, making it extremely difficult to interpret what information the chart is displaying, especially at a glance.
• Confusing colors – The plain background is quite helpful as it makes the visualizations stand out, however the subtle variation in shade actually makes it more difficult to differentiate between the lines for each of the cities.
• Make visualizations clear and precise. It is not a good idea to include all the information in a single visualization which cannot be digested easily doesn’t solve our purpose. So, it’s better to enable drill downs to navigate to more detailed information from the main visualization.

How to fix it:

• Use of vibrant and distinct colors – colors such as green, blue, yellow, or red could be used to indicate different ranges of percentage increase.
• Add options to drill down – drill down option could be used to represent the point where the state reached the percentage value 75%,50% or 25%.

Dashboard could be broken down to multiple dashboards to include states region wise. This makes the data easier to read and digest.

References:

 

https://www.geckoboard.com/blog/5-terrible-dashboard-designs-and-how-to-fix-them/#.WQPdh4jyu00

 

We will not be able to make sense of this endless ocean of information, unless we pay attention to the basics of handling data and presenting them in aesthetically pleasing ways. Aesthetics is what makes this visualization stand out.

However, designing this visualization is not as easy as it looks. Ample amount of experiments and researches have led to the visualization that we see here.

The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne.Here is an example of beautiful visualization that can be produced using the processing programming environment.

Flight Patterns

It’s easy to forget just how many planes are in the skies above us but this visualization reminds us of exactly that and effectively maps the traffic between the various cities of United states. Data from the US federal aviation Administration is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density. FAA data is parsed and plotted using the Processing  programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

The visualization shows flights as glowing dots on a black background and its interesting to see how the geography becomes visible as more flights paths are drawn. This visualization allows us to see the frequency, connections, and opacity of the trails that the flights leave behind as they crisscross around The United States of America. At the very glance the traffic density in and around United states can be captured through this visualization.

However, there are some fundamental problems with this visualization. To start with there is no text or legend representing what the visualization is about. There should be a mechanism to measure or differentiate on the basis of color, thickness, and degree of shading of the connecting lines. Secondly further details regarding the aircrafts or the altitudes etc. cannot be figured from the visualization. The goal here is to facilitate reading and you are forced to justify all your options so as to make it sensible for the viewers.

So, dashboards hold a lot of promise to make sense of the world around us, but only if we think through what data goes into them and how the visuals we are building need to grab our audience. A highly efficient visualization should provide real-time updating, interactivity, and collaborative features. User should be able to decompose charts, drill through measures, zoom in or zoom out on time lines and reveal new things.
References:

http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/lost-in-visualization#axzz4eA6OxVBc.

http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html