Key Outcomes
- Deployed a prototype visualisation tool - view website.
- Designed and undertook user studies to evaluate effectiveness of selected data visualisations.
More Information
For my honours project at Victoria University of Wellington, I created an interactive visualisation tool aimed at displaying data related to gender equality metrics. In 2016, the United Nations selected gender equality as a key goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Global data related to this goal had therefore been collected and distributed to the public via various organisations. However, at the time of my honours project, the distribution of the data was in a form that was not easy to understand or explore. A visualisation tool was therefore created to condense and present this data efficiently and allow interested parties to explore the data more easily by allowing them to choose data representations that suit their inquiries.
Due to time constraints, the tool focused on displaying data from only five specific data sets, selected due to their accuracy, completeness, and relevance to the goal’s actions. I implemented four visualisation types to showcase the data, and deployed these in an application created using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. A PostgreSQL database was used to store and maintain the data, while JavaScript was used for the frontend. The visualisations were created using the JavaScript D3 library. D3 was chosen because it had support for creating a wide range of different visualisations with interactive features such as filtering, styling, and transitions.
User studies were undertaken to evaluate the tool and determine its effectiveness and usability in comparison to existing applications, and identify usability issues and improvements required to enhance user experience.
