The goal for this week was to think about how an interactive graphic based on a particular report by Publish What You Fund, and also published in a Guardian blog, would look. The data in question relates to how transparent major donor organisations are with their own data and so each organisation has been rated using a distinct set of criteria created by Publish What You Fund, therefore producing an overall transparency index.
This assignment has really stretched me this week and made me take full advantage of the sketching/note-taking apps on my tablet as I found I was coming up with ideas in random places and needed to get them down for exploration.
My first task was to find out what the heck “transparency” actually meant and how it was actually measured and I was thankful that the data originated from a very well organised website. I then looked at both source websites and noted down what I thought was missing and how I would like to play with the data myself. This took about three or four days – and this is where a lot of sketching and brain storming came in; thinking of the “what ifs….” and “oooh how about I just change this…” scenarios.
I toyed with the data in Excel to see if I could find any interesting correlations such as splitting the data right down to individual indicators, looking at the annual resources and budget of each donor and in turn where the money goes but what I was really missing was information about the donor itself. I was very pleased to see the UK’s Department for International Development at the top of the list but in all honesty, I really knew nothing about them and so I wanted to build that in to the graphic.
And so I started by jotting down potential graphs/data to include in my final interactive graphic and started arranging the sketches until I had something that I thought could work. Incidentally, I find jotting things down on paper like this so helpful as you invest very little time in it and it allows easy rearranging of elements – paper prototypes FTW!
From there, I installed the trial version of Illustrator CS6 and started playing around. To cut a long story short (it really was a long story as I battled with Illustrator’s graphs – I won in the end though!) I came up with the following design;
Aid Transparency Graphic (PDF)
Aid Transparency Graphic + Notes (PDF)
Notes about the graphic
- The bar chart that can be seen at the top of the graphic can be manipulated by the buttons on the right hand side and the user can select to show the results of individual aid information levels or all of them (the total).
- The user can also select to show particular countries instead of having everything on the graph which I found really hard to read in the Guardian blog.
- If a user clicks on a donor’s name or the bar associated with that donor, the panel at the bottom will display additional information about the organisation. I added a space for some text about the organisation to add a bit of context and also a timeline to chart their major accomplishments so that users would be able to relate to an organisation’s particular focus. Both pieces of information could be scraped from donors’ websites and annual reports.
- I have tried to minimise the use of the word “transparency” and instead used “openness” where possible as I personally wasn’t very clear about what this meant at first.
I am personally really pleased with this, as the work involved way more that playing around with a few graphs. I had to think about what I wanted to say, how I was going to represent it in a prototype form that would communicate how an interactive version of it would work. But I’m doing something that I love and time did indeed fly when I was tinkering all weekend!
AdeSquared 