Hi everyone,
We're exicted to deliver the final site for your feedback. After the last two weeks of working with the data and tweaking the interface, we're confident in the mapping platforms ability to highlight overall trends while easily navigating users to the finer details at the local level. We've written up more explanation below broken down by the major features and componenets of the site.
We focused on the biggest story through the two map types -- displaying he percent change in population on medicaid and the uninsured. This immediately reveals the areas most and least affected for both types.
Our right side layer switcher establishes hierarchy in the state and local area data, focuses on key stories for each geographic level, and provides context to explain the metholodogy behind the potentially unfamiliar Super PUMAs. We can easily change the copy we've written up to better suit your needs.
We've separated the layer switcher and navigation from the core map elements on the left, such as our zoom buttons, geocoder and map legends. Typing a zip code, town or city into the geocoder takes the user to that location on the map and immediately pops up with the corresponding data dashboard.
This geocoder works with mapquest names & places database, so when a user enters "Los Angeles" it returns the corresponding latitude and longitude and zooms the map to this centerpoint. The dashboard then pulls the data from the region that 3falls within that point on the map. So even though Los Angeles is separated into multiple areas, the geocoder will yield the data dashboard of the area that happens to cover the lat/long that corresponds to "LA" in their database.
We have a data dashboard for every county, state, super PUMA, and constructed geography available from the original data.
Each dashboard shows the local area selected in yellow vs. its respective state in grey.
The data has been simplified by category with graphs. Age, race, limitation and gender are all visualized with donut and bar charts to establish continutity between infographics, and we prevent overwhelming viewers with too much information by separating these into four tabs. The matrix to the left has the key numbers of before, after, and delta - with percent change on top. This matrix is static and sits to the left since it's the key snapshot on the region.
We've designed this to fit in a 960px width, like in the template you shared with us. The design also easily scales for a full screen site and iPads since the data dashboards just centers on any size screen.
We still have the following items to implement before the second delivery.
- A "compare" function that allows users to type in a second location from the data dashboard that will then pull that data in place of the default state comparison.
- Testing in internet explorer.
- Final data review (we're currently seeing some problems in Maine).
In the contract, we've budgeted for $3,000 worth of adjustments from one round of feedback. This means we can make design tweaks, copy changes, and data reviews, however this won't cover major functionality changes or significant interface changess. Please let us know if you have any questions about this process, and overall we're looking forward to what you think about the site! It would be great if your team could capture all feedback and return it to us by January 11th at the latest.
We have a few questions about data and methodology that we'd like to run by you, would sometime this Thursday or Friday work for you? This would also be a great chance for us to talk about tweaking the methodology and the language we're using to describe Super PUMAs and ACS counties.
Best, Dave