telling-stories-with-data-portfolio
| home page | visualizing debt | critique by design | final project I | final project II | final project III |
The final data story
Changes made since Part II
- Added a disclaimer in the “Start Investment Now” section to avoid liability issues.
- Added a question at the beginning to be more explicit about the topic - investment.
- Smooth transitions - added descriptions below each section title
- Added one more section talking about inflation, explaining why investment is necessary for most of other students. By using more closely related examples, food and housing price, it becomes more persuasive.
- Added mode details introducing each investment options, and their potential payoffs
- Deleted JP Morgan Chase link
- Font change - 100pt -> 150pt for better visibility. I tested privately in class and 100pt font were not visible enough for students sitting in the back. 150pt font was the one visible enough but not overwhelmingly large.
- Added navigation bar at top
- Changed the salary overview data viz from static picture to HTML embedding to allow users to use interactive features
- Other Abandoned Design Decisions
I really like some other students who used a single section to show critical statistics. I tried to do something like that, but it did not work well in my page. I also considered emphasizing important numbers, e.g. median salary, using red color (because it stands for CMU,) but gave up because red gives an impression of something negative. Another thought was to add background images to the page, but they did not work well either. The white background give a clean and tidy impression, but adding images ruined this. Keeping the page clean makes the story look professional.
The audience
Target Audience:
Other CMU graduate students, every other students in class listening to my presentation will be my audience. I noticed during the final presentation that most of them were interested in my topic as their eyes were staring at the monitor.
Adjustments:
I interviewed two other students from different colleges at CMU, and I got a feedback to add more closely related examples to attract their attentions. Said by one of the interviewee, “Not everyone can make that high salary and would like to use all of them on entertainment like the example did. You need to think about other examples to let them feel related to this topic.” Althuogh not everyone will make $129,000 salary after graduation, but the inflation and rapidly growed price were real. No matter how much money other students will make, they should think about investment to fight agaist these factors.
References
References are included in Shorthand.
Final thoughts
One of the tricky part was to find CMU graduate student average salary. I could not find any available data set online and had to collect them manually. The $129,000 median salary may be controversial because not every CMU graduate students reported their Salary after graduation.
I also checked Heinz college, there was only 1 record.
Another observation was that most of the job titles were Software Engineer, which was known for its high starting salary.
I didn’t find a chance to use some fancy graphs using other tools such as flourish studio and data wrapper because simple graph types, lines & bars, could fultill my need well. I could introduce job distrution locations and do some thing like the following, but this information is unrelated to my topic - investment.
But overall, it was a fun project to do and I got a lot of useful feedback to improve my design in the future.
Lastly, I found Shorthand really useful and planned to use it for my capstone project final report for the client.