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Below is a link to my final data story on Shorthand!
(https://carnegiemellon.shorthandstories.com/veneris_tswd_theenergyflip/index.html)
Since Part II, I’ve made quite a few changes to the narrative structure, the Call to Action, and some key components of my visualizations.
I definitely agreed with my interviewees, along with the TA/Instructor feedback, that my narrative could be strengthened throughout the site. To do this, I built in more statistics, added in more informative paragraphs to tell the audience what the data supports. One of the best examples of this is the Texas policy explanation: at first glance, it’s weird that Texas has made exceptional strides in renewable energy generation, and during Part II of the review process, this was kind of lost on the interviewees. By highlighting exactly why this phenomenon happened, I think that it improved the call to action and narrative structure a lot!
Related to the narrative structure, I had reviews that said the Call to Action was a bit muddled or even random, and it didn’t even work all that great! Additionally, instructor feedback let me know that I could make the Call to Action less political. This posed a challenge for me, because I’m someone from the political advocacy and climate action background, so it was difficult to reframe what an effective Call to Action could look like without involving something that seemed inherently political. To make ammends, I decided to attack the Call to Action as a two-pronged approach, considering two different audiences.
Using insights from my interviews, I knew that I had to develop two different audience members to tailor messaging to in the Call to Action. First, I developed a Call to Action centered around policy that works for Texas in incerasing renewable generation: this Call to Action was meant for a policymaker on a local level who can institute similar changes in their county or state. Much of Texas’ achievements in renewables lies solely in this lax regulatory landscape, so to me, this was a clear call to action for a policymaker that flowed well with my existing narrative.
On the otherhand, I realize that there should be another Call to Action revolving around the average person who cares about the issue of pollution, but has very little power in shaping regulations. This led me to my not-as-political Call to Action, centering around the individual actions that a person can take to curtail pollution generally, with clear ties to stepping away from fossil fuels.
I felt like these Calls to Action were a nice happy medium, and they were not inherently partisan like my original “call your representative” Call to Action.
The main critiques that I received on visualization centered around the maps of the United States that I generated in the overall picture and the Texas Case Study. Nearly every interviewee described the maps as difficult to navigate, interpret, and busy. To make these visualizations clearer, I tinkered with Tableau to create different layers, isolating the United States through some display tricks. One problem that I did come to still, though, was that Alaska and Hawaii were slightly out of view in both maps. To counter this problem, I added a “how to interact” blurb under each map, explaining how to pan over to the left to investigate Hawaii and Alaska. Additionally, I was able to remove the unnecessary filters on the righthand side that were a consistent point of contention for the interviewees. In all, I think that these changes allow for a more seamless transition between the narrative and the visualization.
Additionally, I tweaked the bar chart that I originally had comparing Texas and California to be a line graph because upon further investigation, I found that it told the same story, but it was a lot cleaner than the two bar charts next to each other. I also decided to isolate wind in the visualization, because I felt that it was more in line with the narrative of Texas’ energy regulations leading to success in wind farms in the state.
I did make some last-minute stylistic changes after my presentation, becuase I did not like how busy the background was during the actual presentation on the big screen: even I got distracted by all of the literal moving parts in the background! To counter this, I changed the bulk of the backgrounds to plain black, especially behind the visualizations, to limit eye traffic. The result is a project that isn’t exactly as colorful as I’d like it to be, but I think it’s still on-theme.
All sources on Shorthand.
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I enjoyed this project a lot, and I think I will continue to work on it for a complete design sample in the future! I wish I had more chances to revist some Tableau features, especially the “playback loop” that I could not get to function on shorthand specifically. I think I was most excited to build out the “mood” of my design, which I think inherently tied to the narrative: I wanted a kind of dark and moody atmosphere to permeate, but I wanted the “hope” of the shift to renewables to act as a brightspot, so I chose to highlight this aspect using colors that popped.