[okfn-labs] request for help on usability / visualisation

Mon Oct 1 11:46:00 UTC 2012

Hi Daniel, Hi Eva,

It's a shame, I know, but I must admit that I didn't found the right time yet. The data looks impressive, right, but the visualization needs some more work.

Why not use a developer-friendly framework like Bootstrap to solve 90% of the HTML/CSS issues? The current layout feels a bit messy.

The visualization needs to get more compact and straight to the point. Scrolling down 8000 pixels is not what you typically want to do. Hard to see the broader picture. The contracts for instance, should be linked directly from the green bars and not be listed below (if that makes sense). 

In general it's a good idea to have all the entities (persons, companies, contracts) represented only once in the visualization/page.

For me it's hard to get who these people are, maybe a photo and/or link to a Wikipedia page would help.

The procurement sums per year and company are not visualized at all. There's just a bar chart showing the sum over all companies, right?

Numbers as big as 88 788 418,64 are beyond our imagination. Write € 88 mio instead.

But even written as millions, it's hard to get a real sense of what those numbers mean. What was the service returned for that amount? Was it justified?

And regarding the relationship to the searched person, what did he/she get back from that money? Do you know what his/her compensation was in that year?

Btw, pie charts with more than 5 slices don't make any sense. Group the slices into "others" after the fifth one.

And, how about visualizing a picture of all companies and all persons. How many are there? How about a company-centered view, showing all the relations to other persons. Are that politicians? If yes, there might not be *that* many, to include them all in one visualization. If it's less than 200-300 hundreds, it should work. How about showing which persons are related to similar companies?

A search is a helpful entry point for journalists looking for specific information, but not if you want to explore a dataset.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best,
Gregor

Am 30.09.2012 um 20:23 schrieb Daniel Dietrich <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org>:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have contacted you before on this. I would like to help a friend Eva (in CC) from fair-play-alliance with their amazing anti-corruption project: 
> 
> 	http://znasichdani.sk./
> 
> Znasichdani is a impressive project making procurement data available in Slovakia. I was wondering if OKF Labs could help the project to improve and become even better by providing feedback and recommendations on the usability and the visualization? This does not include coding or design and have to be time consuming. I think a short expert review and skype session would already be very helpful. 
> 
> Would anyone from Labs be available for this kind of expert review? Thanks in advance!
> 
> All best
> Daniel
> 
> 
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