More on Planning and Designing

Before identifying which analysis processes the visualisation will support, I would need first to clarify the scope and purpose of the visualisation and the tasks for the audience.

After some more research on the initial plan of visualising World Global Oil Trade, I think I should pivot the topic due to following reasons. 

I can find oil production data by nation and trade data (import and export) but not flow data. This means that I cannot visualise the flow from one nation to another as I anticipate. 

First, that would make the visualisation much less interesting for the visual effects.

Second, my hypothesis is that by looking at the trade data with the flow, the user can find a connection between diplomatic relations between countries and their oil trade volume. This won’t be possible without the flow data.

So my plan now is to merge the imports/exports data with production data and oil prices. Oil prices tend to interfere with economy growth of importing nations. Also, the visualisation might provide a data-driven answer for the collapse in oil production in recent years. The user tasks are to find out:

How World Oil Supply and Price relate to the growth of World Economy (particularly by looking at 2008 crisis, and the changes right after the crisis and after 2011 when there are no post-crisis stimulus actions anymore)?

What a nation’s oil production data, imports and exports tell us about its economy?

Predicting world economy with oil data

Now I will do a quick recap on the eight visual analysis processes by Isenberg et al: browse, parse, discuss collaboration style, establish task strategy, clarify, select, operate and validate. This summarize helps me better understand the processes and apply them to my visualisation correctly.

During the Browse process, the team scans through the available data to form their first impressions. The Parse process involves reading of the task to create common understanding of the problem and how to solve it. During Discuss Collaboration Style process, the team discusses the overall task division strategy. In the Establish Task Strategy process, the team figures out the best ways to perform the tasks with the available data and tools. The Clarify process involves understanding information artefacts. The Select process is about finding and selecting relevant information for a particular task. In Validate process, the team confirms the solution of a task. Except for the Discuss Collaborative Style process, I think that the remaining seven processes are also true for individual visualisation analysis. 

Using the above framework in designing the World Oil Trade and Supply visualization, I anticipate that the visualization will support:

1. Browse/Overview: Given the large amount of data that this visualisation encapsulates and the fact that people tend to be overwhelmed by information overload. I think it is best not to display all available data in the beginning. Instead, it will first display data of selected countries over the years (top oil producers, top oil importers, and selected countries of interest such as Finland and neighboring countries). This enables the audience to scan through important data. It is, however, possible to enable overview of all data (action view all data).  

2. Parse: The questions that suggest the tasks for the audience are displayed on top of the visualisation. These questions steer them in the direction of finding insights I want them to look for.

3. Clarify: The visualisation will include annotations that explain different visual encodings and the actions users can perform.

4. Select: User can toggle or select/deselect different data layers. They can also filter information for a specific country.

5. Validate: There will be an animation of changes over time and about the relationships between oil supply and world economy that enable the audience to validate their findings. This animation can be played once the visualisation is loaded before the audience performs any of their actions.