My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
In this
second example from my course on Information Design and Visualization, another time series, the student found data on the number of organ donations in the U.S. over the past 15 years. The data was broken down by organ type and also specified the number of deceased vs. living donors. As you can see
below, she did almost everything wrong in the first version. It only represents the total number of organs, wastes a lot of ink on unhelpful chart junk, and creates enough contrast and visual tension to make your head hurt. Her design improved immensely over many iterations. The final version uses colors to differentiate between organs and shades of those colors to represent the deceased and living donors—the number of living donors is only significant for kidneys. In this visualization, it is easy to see the relative number of donations per organ, as well as in total, over the years represented. The student was able to pack a fair amount of data into a compact, easily understandable visualization.