Exploratory Data Visualizations
Crafting visual, aural, temporal representations of data, using the U.S. census health insurance data as a case study.
2021
Visual design, art direction, motion graphics
Details
Details
Team: Elaine Lu, Greg Chen, Youngryun Cho
CMU Communication Design Studio
4 weeks
Tools
Figma, Google sheets
My role
Data cleaning, research, narrative structure definition, visual design, user experience design, design system
Video Demo
We designed a data visualization prototype to show patterns in U.S. health insurance over the past 10 years.
We decided that combining narrative indexical structures will best frame the data in a readable way. The guided narrative begins with the introduction of our research question, The sequence will start at the macro level for insurance rates U.S. from 2010 to 2019.
Narrative Structure
Research Question Sequence (1/8)
Research Question Sequence (2/8)
USA Insurance Rates 2010-2019 YoY (3/8)
State Insurance Rates 2010-2019 YoY (4/8)
Compare Insurance Rates between States (5/8)
Compare over 10 years (8/8)
Insurance rate of cities in Pennsylvania (6/8)
Overlaying Metrics for Poverty Level, City vs. State vs. USA (8/8)
Sequence
“Information is really data transformed into something more valuable by building context around it so that it becomes understandable.”
– Nathan Shedroff, Experience Design
Design System
We each explored cartesian and polar coordinate systems to visualizing comparisons between demographic types, demographics vs. Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh vs. the USA. We used position to convey place, length to convey time, size to convey the amount, and color hue to convey data that belong to the same entity but within different categories. Other cues like direction, angle, and volume were used for transitions, and were represented with motion.
