Course Information

Final Project Expectations

What I care about most in these projects is that their design follow good information visualization practices, as we've discussed all semester in class. All projects should take into account the proper use of visualization components such as color, size, position, animation, and so on. I will be very unhappy with improper use of visual properties.

Applications of visualization to analysis or presentation problems should attempt to take usability issues into account, and should help the user achieve insight on the underlying data or problem that was not possible without the visualization. By insight I mean making the non-visible visible, or showing trends or patterns or outliers or missing information, or by presenting the underlying information in a more understandable way.

If you're inventing a new kind of visualization, it might be that the underlying results are not entirely successful. That is ok, but be sure to follow good design principles and thoroughly discuss what did and did not work in your design.

Be sure to make clear in your writeup if you're using visualization for analysis, presentation, or some other use.

The writeup should include (not necessarily in this order; you can reuse descriptions from your project proposal):

  • Title of project
  • Name(s) of student(s) involved
  • Project goals, including what kinds of tasks the interface containing the visualization is targeted towards. (Include if this is analysis, presentation, both, or other.)
  • Discussion of related work.
  • Description of your visualization and/or analysis. This should include well-sized screenshots or other illustrations. This should include:
    • The data (if any) that was used.
    • Discussion of the use of visual properties.
    • Discussion of how this visualization provides insight on the problem (or if it doesn't work, what the issues are).
  • What kinds of results you achieved.
  • What kinds of results you did not achieve but which you would have liked to have the time or tools for.
  • Which tools were be used to accomplish the goals.
  • Link(s) to visualization code if appropriate.
  • Link to a thumbnail I can use for the projects page.
Due Dates:

  • April 21 or 28: Class presentation. 10 minutes for talking, 5 minutes for questions and feedback. Be sure to make your presentation and visualization web-accessible so we can switch quickly between groups. If you need to run code that can't run from the web, bring a laptop with the code already loaded and ready to go.

  • May 12: Turn in your writeup of the visualization online. Please email me a url, not an attachment, even if the url contains a doc or pdf (although I prefer html writeups). I plan to link to them from the course website unless you tell me otherwise.
    Deadline extended to May 15

Project Grading Proportions:

  • Class presentation of project results (must fit within designated time limits) (25%)
  • Quality of writeup of results (25%)
  • Quality of actual project (50%)