Hernandez-Berrios-Portfolio

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Critique by Design

In this assignment we chose a graphic for Makeover Monday to redesign. Below is the graphic I chose from the Eurostat page titled “Pick Up a Book and Read”.

Pick up a book and read - Eurostat

Website of graphic: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20200422-1

I selected the data visualization from this page because I am an avid reader and the graphic stood out to me. The things that stood out were the different line colors telling us what each line represented, and how the line graph was inside a book. At first glance, just looking at the graphic, I did not know what story it was telling. I had no idea what the numbers on the y-axis were, could they be euros, percentages, or an index levels? Upon reading the article, I realized that they were trying to tell people that books had not increased much in price compared to all other products in the EU. The article states that the price of books in the EU is “growing more slowly than the total consumer prices”. It used the HICP to measure the price inflation of books and the price inflation of all products. The HICP can be seen as the consumer price index (CPI) but for all of the European Union rather than each individual country.

Source: Pick up a book and read! (n.d.). Ec.europa.eu. Retrieved February 7, 2024, from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20200422-1

Data Visualization Effectiveness Profile

To critique the visualization I used the Stephen Few “Data Visualization Effectiveness Profile”. I ranked the graphic the following:

• Usefulness - 7
• Completeness - 5
• Perceptibility - 7
• Truthfulness - 10
• Intuitiveness - 6
• Aesthetics - 7
• Engagement - 5

Reasoning: The visualization was not bad. The colors were not too many that it became distracting. It used colors that contrast from each other to compare the “all products” to the “books” which I liked. I think it was difficult to understand what the index was and how it was measured from the graph. All the information provided about the y-axis is that 2015 is the reference point and 2015 = 100. As someone not familiar with the graph much, it was difficult to understand what the left hand index was. Also the bottom (x-axis) was a bit hard to interpret as well because it seems as though there should be bar graphs rather than lines for the points, because as I reader I see that 2009 spans from 94, 93, and back to 95. There is no average for 2019. I would make the x-axis have lines above each number rather than in between the numbers, that way it is easier to understand what the number is for that year. I would also add an explanation about what the y-axis is. The scale at the moment cannot be understood, so I would add the units as part of the label. Maybe one could even add a side chart that explains the range of values (i.e what value is “good” or what value is “poor”). I would also re-title it to grab the reader’s attention “Books have become cheaper” or something similar so readers want to see what the graph is talking about.

Following my critique I decided to come up with some sketches to help me understand the data better and start thinking about how I can do the redesign.

Sketches

Following my critique I knew I wanted to focus on the years 2015 to 2020 since the original viz was using 2015 as the reference date due to it having an HICP of 100. My sketches followed that time frame and all of them depicts the years 2015 to 2020 for the HICP for books and for all products. I wanted to keep the two-color difference for the products from the orginizal viz and so I either made one line dark and one light (as seen in Sketch 1), or the bar graphs: one lined and the other white (as seen in Sketch 2 and 3). I also played around with titles for Sketch 2 and 3, trying to find one that would suit the graphic. Sketch 1 was the simplest sketch of all of them. I did it as a way to start thinking about the data and how I could change it. In Sketch 2, I tried thinking a little bit differently on how I could re-do it and so I tried a horizontal bar graph. Then in Sketch 3, I finally settled on a normal bar graph with the column for “all products” next to the column “books”. This way it was easier to compare the HICP to each other, for each of the prducts from year to year. I also added a caption to explain what the HICP was. In my third sketch I added a label to the y-axis so my readers can know what the numbers stand for. I was thinking of also making a diverging color scheme to let readers know if a value was “good” or “bad”.

1. Sketch

2. Sketch

3. Sketch

After doing my sketches, I showed them to two students so I could get their feedback on what they thought the sketch was, what they liked or didn’t liked, and what they would do differently.

Student 1, mid 20s

• Can you describe to me what this is telling you?
  • Shows the relationship of books sales and all other products between 2015-2020 (for sketch 1 and 2)
  • They thought that for Sketch 1 y-axis is amount sold
  • For Sketch 2, shows that all products are rising in price but books aren’t
• Is there anything you find surprising or confusing?
  • “Is it the price per book the y-axis?” (referring to sketch 1)
  • Unsure what hte numbers mean in sketch 2
• Who do you think is the intended audience for this?
  • A lot of people, teachers, professors, stores that sell books and other things
• Is there anything you would change or do differently?
  • First sketch, needs labels for the y-axis and a title
  • The second sketch, specify what the numbers are: are they price or what are they?
  • Last sketch is good but would change the title

Student 2, mid 20s

• Can you tell me what you think this is?
  • Sketch 1, it does not have a title so it is hard to tell what it is. There is also no label on the y-axis which does not help. They thought it was something about how many products were sold vs books
  • Sketch 2, tells us that all products are rising but not books. Is unsure what HICP is and how it relates to viz
  • Sketch 3, tells us about the difference in HICP in “all products” vs “books”. It says consumer price inflation has not affected books as much as products
• Is there anything you would change or do differently?
  • For the third sketch, change the title to something less biased

After getting the opinion of my peers, I moved on to downloading the data and transferring my sketches to Tableau. Since sketch 1 and 2 were the most confusing ones and both my peers seemed to like the 3rd sketch better, I decided to use that one as my reference for making the viz in Tableau.

Changing Data and moving on to Tablaeu

When I downloaded the data to my computer and opened it up on Excel I realized that the data set listed all the countries and their HICP for each month of the year from 1990 to 2020 (snapshot included below). I had to change the data a bit so I could work with averages for each year from 2015 to 2020. I seperated the data into a new sheet and only focused on the EU countries (which were already merged into a category by the dataset). From there I did an excel function to average months 1-12 for every year for the EU and created a new data table with the information I needed (snapshot included below). I decided to do averages for each year rather than individual points for every month, for every year, because the averages would work better with my graphic (bar graphs).

Screenshot of original excel data

Screenshot of my new datatable in excel (averages for each year)

I uploaded the new data to Tableau to begin working with it. When I did that I could not my viz to look like my sketch #3. It did not let me have the column for “all products” next to the one for “books”. So I played around with a few other viz ideas in Tableau.

Bar graph with Pages

The rough draft of the viz above was nice because you could flip the pages back and forth between all products and books. The bar graphs were also color coded (sequential coloring) which lets readers know what HICP values are “good” or “bad”. While this draft was good, I still wanted to have the two categories next to each other.

Stacked Bars

I also tried stacked bars, where orange was books and blue was all products. This was cool to try but not beneficial to my viz or my reader since it would be confusing to know what is going on. One could think that “books” is a part of “all products” when that is not the case and they are both two distinct categories.

Getting Closer to Final Viz

I tried to once again put the “all products” and “books” next to each other for every year but could not do it. I got a bar chart that basically had two mini bar charts inside (left for all products, right for books). I added some distinct colors to the bars making green the bars with data closer to 100, and bars with data further from 100 red. This was so readers could tell what HICP indeces were “bad”- meaning they rose a lot, or “good”- meaning they did not rise by much.

To get to my final viz, I realized I needed to change my excel. I went back to excel and created a new data sheet that had “books” and “all products” next to each other (screenshot below). I opened this new data on tableau. When it made the connection my workspace had double column names (i.e “category” “category 1” “year” “year 1” “index” “index 1”…). Having “double” column names allowed me to do the data side by side like I wanted to. In the next section I will add my final visualization and explain how I did it and why I chose what I did.

Final Viz

For my final visualization, I decided to do the bar graphs with side by side bars. I chose this style of graphic becuase it lets the reader compare each category more easily. You can see the difference between the categories for each year. I focused on 2015-2020 only, rather than 1990-2020. This was because in the orginal website they wanted people to know book prices have not risen as much (compared to all other goods) and therefore they should consider buying books during the pandemic to keep themselves busy. In the original graphic you could not see the difference between ‘all products’ and ‘books’, it seemed that their difference was very small due to the big range of years. My graphic, with the short-time period, let’s the reader see more clearly the difference in HICP since the range in the y-values and x-values are smaller.

Just like in the original graphic, I decided to make each category two distinct colors (yellow and blue) so it is easier to distinguish between the two. I took into consideration what my peers suggested and I added a label to the y-axis, a caption that explains what the HICP index is, and an unbiased title. The y-axis label tells the reader what the numbers indicate (in this case HICP index) and if the reader is confused as to what HICP is, the caption under the title gives a brief discription of it. I also changed the title from the original graphic to “Steadfast Pages: HICP Index for Books vs. All Other Products in the EU”. The title kind of lets on that the book prices are staying about the same price while everything else is increasing.

With this MakeoverMonday, I attempeted to make the Eurostat graphic more user and reader friendly. I also wanted to make the title more catchy so it could attract readers and make them want to continue reading.