This semester I have been working in my capstone project. For my capstone I surveyed 120 indigenous farmers in the Andean region of Ecuador. I want to propose a public policy that would directly improve the lives of this particular ethnic group, a group that throughout the country's history has been systematically secluded from economic progress. This page is a visual representation of the most important section of my project. Here, the user will find evidence of what indigenous people say are the most important challenges in their daily lives. Understanding the information in this page is crucial for the development of future policy. Academics and politicians try to create solutions based on their perception of what issues afflict different groups in the country, but rarely do they go out to the field and ask regular people what their thoughts are. The idea of the computer being ecnyclopedic in its nature, as Janet Murray argues, is central to this page. With so much information scattered around, it is important to give any user looking for concrete information an easy to visualize design. It summarizes information in an intuitive, human centered design. People looking for information about the challenges indigenous people face must look no further than this page.
In the design process I wanted the user to feel they were participating, and making the most of the computer as a participatory medium. I did not want the user to have all the information all at once. In the beginning I was thinking of putting the information of how each respondent ranked their preferences side by side. However, this was messy and it did not allow the user to see how important each challenge was. If a challenge appears to have high frequencies in each of the rank, we can see that this challenge is consistently ranked amongst the most important. For this reason I included the three rank buttons. The user can interact with the data. They can see how frequent a challenge appears in the top three rank. Allowing this user participation provides a more efficient sharing of information. An important part of the planning stage, which also was the biggest limitation of the project had to do with the spatial affordance of the DOM. It was hard to find the correct graphing structures needed to represent the information in a way that would allow the user to see all of the data. In order to fit all of the information in the same graph, I needed to automatically update the scaling of the graph chart, every time the user wants to see the information of each rank. Otherwise, the space that each figure occupies would have changed, affecting the strucutre of the entire page. There is a strict hierarchy of organization in this page. The title explains the data, in large letters, so the user understands what is happening. The buttons which change the information are above the graphs, so the user can avoid scrolling when changing from one rank to the other. The buttons can be clicked multiple times, so the user can compare the information easily. Finally, the conclusion of why the project is relevant is displayed at the end. This heirarchy ensures that the emphasis is on the data itself.