Information Visualization - Crime in Seattle

This originally appeared in my HCDE 210 process blog (syklla.wordpress.com), this was my first experience with Information Visualization in my freshman year of college.

My Graph showing what kinds of crimes are being committed.

When initially using Tableau it was very confusing. As I experimented more, it became easier to use, but there are still features that I know exist, that I can’t find or figure out how to use. I believe that the program would benefit from a short tutorial or clearer labels on the different buttons. The user group I chose to represent the data for is Parents. Even though user research was not part of this assignment, I did ask a couple of parents their opinion on my questions and the way I represented the data. The questions I ended up with were the when, where and what of crime that would directly impact children. I chose my wildcard (pictured above) to be a more reassuring graphic. All the others show how much crime could impact your child while this shows how that crime is a relatively small occurrence compared to the rest of the criminal activity in the Seattle area.

My Wildcard feature, comparing the crimes represented in the other graphics to crime on the whole.

Here is the link to my Sprint 4 Tableau Public file.

Some problems that I encountered were definitely figuring out how to properly use Tableau. Initially, I had difficulty setting up a map graphic, I did eventually figure that out. The biggest problem that I came across was importing a second set of data. I wanted to show where schools and parks where on the map, so parents could clearly see where a crime was in relation to them. But when trying to upload the second data set, Tableau was unable to properly read the data or display it in the same graphic.

A map representing the location of crimes throughout Seattle.

Wildcard:  What did you do to insure that your graphics would be easy to interpret?

I chose bright colors to identify the data that I wanted to pop the most to the parents looking at the dashboard. The data that I only had in there to give a sense of scale I put in grey so that attention would be drawn there. I also chose the shape I did on the map so it would be clearer when there are more incidents in the same area.

A timeline showing when crime is the most frequent during a week.

Another group who may be interested in analyzing data may be animal control. They could see when and where the most animal attacks, deaths and other incidents occur to predict where the need to send their employees and when to expect a rush in occurrences. This information could also be publicly available on a website for citizens to be informed, or can be used to analyze the area to see what may be causing a spike in animal incidents.