Context
I was given a chance to work with the Graduate Students Advisory Board (GSAB) in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University to visualize a departmental survey data. This survey is about how graduate students in the Department perceive their interaction with their advisor, the department, the division they belong (e.g., biochemistry, analytical chemistry, chemical education). My design goal for this project is to make it easier for audiences to understand and analyze the survey response data.
In the following section, I will show you the original data tables from the survey (the before). Then, I will provide the background information for this survey data and my suggestions for improvement. After that, I will show the final draft of data charts (the after), and ultimately, the graphical tools and strategies that I apply in this project. This approach of presentation is adapted from Visual Strategies: A practical guide to Graphics for scientists & engineers written by Felice C. Frankel and Angela H. DePace. I find these tables very useful in summarizing my approaches to applying appropriate visualization strategies to the given set of data.
Before
Background Information
| Who are the audiences? | Mostly departmental staffs, faculties; students will also have assess to the report. |
| How will it be used? | As a paper document used at a faculty meeting. |
| What is the goal? | To allow the staffs and faculties to discuss what the departmental staffs and faculties have done well or could improve according to students' survey responses. |
| What is the challenge? | To catch the attention of the staffs and faculties, to allow them to identify what the students satisfied or unsatisfied with in a short period of time. |
Suggestions for Makeover
- Use a more organized and intuitive way to visualize the statistics. The original tables contain numbers to represent the number of students who perceive each of the survey questions in various ways. However, they lack a visual cue to help the audience process the numerical data.
- Use bar charts to visualize the data.
- Use color to categorize the negative, neutral, and positive responses.
After
Graphical Tools
| Compose | Turn the tables into simplified bar charts. Show all survey questions on the left column and all statistics on the right column. |
| Abstract | The length of each bar is normalized to the highest value. |
| Color | Use red with different saturation to indicate negative perceptions, grey to indicate neutral perceptions, green with different saturation to indicate positive perceptions. |
| Refine | Align survey questions with right column edges to make it easier to make the connection to the corresponding data. |
| Software | Microsoft PowerPoint |
Side Note
After showing the bar charts above to my colleagues, they were able to point out that students were unsatisfied with their advisors’ mentorship and guidance, but very happy that they understood the project enough and treated them with respect. The pattern in each bar chart allowed the readers to identify the students’ response in general without having to look into the numbers. The cultural meaning behind the colors also helped the readers to “feel” the data.
I want like to say thank you to Elijah Roth, a representative in GSAB as well as a dear friend of mine, for willing to offer me the opportunity to visualize the survey data. The process of creating the bar charts was educational, inspiring and motivating (to a nerd that is passionate about DataViz and sees raw data as X’mas gifts like me). Also, thanks for providing insightful feedbacks so that we could refine the charts to a point which both of us are satisfied with the outcome.