Although this particular visualization (
Terrifying Tornadoes by Eve Thomas) is quite wordy, it has an overall clean aesthetics to it and contained an interesting method of combining heatmaps and bar graphs. However, upon closer inspection of the visualization, the author didn't really provide a clear objective through either the title and the subtitle. It seems to be just a visually neatly done visualization with no distinct coherency besides "Tornadoes". A more befitting title would be "Random US tornado facts", but even then it still wouldn't provide a clear direction of the following content.
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| "Why is New Mexico largely untouched by Tornadoes?" |
The heatmap clearly shows each states accumulated amount of tornadoes and answers the authors question, but I believe having individual dots indicating each tornados starting point that could be sorted by year would be more interesting and helpful for the audience. The improvement would also help visualize a pattern in why certain states have more tornadoes than others.
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| "But why" |
The line graph clearly and neatly showcases the recorded number of tornadoes but the supporting text highlighted above contradicts the title and with the graph showing the numbers from the 1950s ends up being a questionable addition to the visualization.
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| "Poor placement of options" |
I found this combination of a heatmap and bar graph quite interesting as it helps clearly pinpoint the tornadoes , Injuries and or Fatalities occurrence in a timeline. However, the placement of the options and the first paragraph's formatting breaks the design consistency it had earlier.
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| "What's the purpose?" |
There's an option to expand the data by each day in the week of the month but the "pop-up" on click doesn't indicate the day and at that size, the user experience is quite awful. But interesting, the visual below expands on the occurrence on each day of the month.
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"Design inconsistency"
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The following text and visual shown above further breaks the design consistency with no real connection with each other. The author answers why certain months see huge uptick in tornado occurrences but didn't answer the importance of why the 17th has the highest occurrence of tornadoes. The visual also bleeds further down into a non relevant dot graph.
Although the objective isn't as clear as I'm lead to believe and the design inconsistency is somewhat distracting, once the author narrows down the topic about tornadoes in the US and fixes the design oversights, the end result would be a much more rich and interesting visualization.
Hey Elvin,
ReplyDeleteI like your analysis on this visualization, however I think the visualization you chose might be closer to an infographic due to the amount of information that was presented to the audience, that may be why the topic and the chart seems so broad.
I enjoyed your captions that were made after each screenshot you posted though.
Hi Elvin,
ReplyDeleteYour analysis of the above information is great! I would agree with Laurie here that it seems the visualization chosen may be closer to an infographic. That being said, you made really good points about this visual and it is clear how it could have been made better for the reader.
Hi Elvin,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your analysis on this data viz. I think you a good job at dissecting the things that could have been done better, for it to be easier to understand as a reader. I do however also agree with Laurie that it might be a infographic because it did have loads of info on it, but nonetheless, I still liked your analysis!
Hi Elvin! I really like how you annotated the images to draw attention to exactly what you were talking about. You included a good number of them to cover lots of different angles which is really interesting. I would have liked to see a full size version of the map of the first image to get a little more context for what you're saying. I also totally agree with you that the design is really inconsistent and hard to understand. Great job on this!
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