On Wednesday Andy set us the challenge of making over our Data School application viz, which needed to be presented on Thursday afternoon. This instantly filled me with dread as it took me about 3 days to build my original viz and I was pretty happy with the original, so a makeover in a few hours looked like a pretty daunting task.

But once I started to reflect on what I had originally done, it didn’t seem like such a big challenge anymore.

Purpose:

Visualise the Big Bang Theory as Dr Sheldon Cooper would have wanted.

Intent:

Exploratory & Analytical

What works well:

• There is a consistent theme, I spent a lot of time thinking about the overall aesthetic, even down to the names of the individual viz’s
• There is lots to explore and manipulate within the viz (if you have the inclination to click on things)

What doesn’t work well:

• There is probably too much information in here, it’s data viz for data viz sake!
• The long view format doesn’t work. Every viz has an action that controls another viz somewhere else on the screen
• I lost sight of the original purpose for creating the viz, which was to know how many times does Sheldon Cooper wear each t-shirt

So here is my makeover:

This works much better for me as it still keeps the science theme, it’s exploratory and it’s easier to answer the original question…”how many times does Sheldon wear each t-shirt?”