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jamemcc

Visualization of New Mexico's Population in 3 parts coded in D3

##Summary This Map of New Mexico present information about the relative population across the state, it's evolution since 1900 and other facts related to population. It should be interesting to those who know about New Mexico or are generally interested in population trends.

It presents the counties of New Mexico as a Chloropleth using a Quartize scale which encodes populations of the counties as colors: white means the county did not yet exist and the data is actually missing. dark red represents population's above 500K which is really only Bernallillo where the major city in NM called Albuquerque is. Yellow to Red represents populations in between those

##Design: The initial design was intended to show a chloropleth which would explain how New mexico could be such a less populated State except for Albuquerque/county of Bernallilo which is a faily large city. It was intended to show the change in population from 1990 to 2010 which is available on the us goverment census website. It was envisioned that the chloropleth transiton of population over time whould make for a good visual. The initial prototype/map without filling is provided as the HTML file called NMPopMapOnly.html. see below.

The visualization ended up at 3 stages implementing the visualization experience theory referred to in Udacity Data Visualization class as the Martini Glass. The Martini Glass experience as applied to this visualization is:

Martini Base: User s allowed to explore the population of each county in New Mexico as of the most recent Census in 2010.
Martini Stem: User is shown the transtion visualization of how population changed from 1900 to 2010.
Martini Drink: The user is presented all the information and can consume it as they see fit.

##Feedback from reviewers:

  1. coworker Daniel: From before it was uploaded to GIST
    • very good treatment of new mexico data. There is lots of data that could be presented in this framework. My change was to add more types of data to the Table which is to the right of the map in stage 3.
    • Couldn't see what year was being transitioned to as the Stage 2 - population transition ran. My change was to add the years button on top which visually highlight the progress by turning red but also serve as navigation to that year when in standalone mode.
  2. Peer review Andrew: From before it was uploaded to GIST
    • Transtion of the states is from black tot he next color - doesn't make as much sense. Explanation: on firefox the transtion of an SVG.path fill seems to start from Black. As a workaround I set the default background of the SVG to orange so transition from orange is not so distracting.
    • Year's buttons blink black as they are reset - each decade of the transition - very distracting. I changed the underlying color of the divs that make up the years button the same color (NM Yellow) that the transtion is going to, Black flash disappeared.
  3. Professional review by friend Benny who is a professional photographer
    • Can't read some County Names as the white font color matches some of the fill color. My change was to change color form white to grey
    • Orange color scheme good for color blind people, no change
    • well in the helptext should be we will - changed
    • Hover over for states that didnt' exist (white space in early decades) should explain the white space. I added tool tip of "not yet seceded"
    • Grey of modal is not covering whole screen, distressing experience nad makes clicking off it fail - Changed Modal width to 100%
    • Need to cite a source for the data - I added citation at the bottom of the screen
    • Should be able to select table rows or counties in the 3rd/final martini. I added selection to rows as well. 4.Udacity Feedback after first submission:
    • Needs to be more Explanatory. I changed to add the explanation button experience.
    • Fix lack of Style tag issue
    1. Matt review:
    • Would like to be able to see the State Grphic while reading explanations. Change was to move explanation pane to the right of the State graphic.
    • Fix words had seceeded which need space between.

##Resources

  1. http://d3-legend.susielu.com/#color-quant for the javascript library and help to create legend
  2. Mike Bostock and /d3noob/a22c42db65eb00d4e369 for toolips
  3. U.S. Census Bureau for the data