A1-JeremyHuddleston
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa08
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Assignment A1 - Jeremy Huddleston
The Good: Electoral Polling Map
Explanation
This map originated from electoral-vote.com. It is intended to give the observer information about the possible outcome of the 2008 presidential election based on recent polling.
Deconstruction
This map summarizes recent polling activity for the 2008 presidential election in a way that is very powerful to the observer. The use of shading to determine the level of "dedication" to a particular candidate as well as summary totals for each category provides the observer with all the initial information that they want to see. Mousing over the provides details about past elections and recent polling data for the hovered-over state.
The Bad: Chess Strategy
"From"
"To"
"Or to the other side"
Explanation
From http://chess.about.com, these three images form the introduction on a discussion regarding the castle special move in Chess.
Deconstruction
The viewer needs to shift their gaze from one image to the other to figure out what has changed. Due to change blindness, the viewer might miss the change, although that is unlikely given the discussion that goes along with it. What is more likely to occur is the user studying the images making sure nothing *else* change because they are aware of change blindness and don't want to miss something.
Furthermore, these images show castling occurring for both black and white. This extra change is extraneous and possibly adds to confusion (why are both sides moving?)
Revision
"King-side Castle"
"Queen-side Castle"
This revision reduces the number of images required to just two and illustrates the possible moves without the need to detecting change.
Some Asides
Another Bad: BSD Locking
From p259 of The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System. You can often count on technical manuals to have visuals that are more confusing than the text. This is somehow supposed to describe "five types of overlap considered by the kernel when a range lock is added" for the BSD4.4 ... yeah...
USA vs UK - Smoking Warning
In the USA, the Surgeon General's warning is small, overly wordy, and on the side of a cigarette carton. It is in a place that the consumer is less likely to notice and the size of the font makes that attention even less likely. In the UK, however, the warning takes up a good portion of the front of the package and is quite succinct using only two words in large letters, "Smoking Kills". While both products do have warnings, the approach used in the UK is much more effective.
Good: Diffstat
hw/xquartz/X11Application.h | 1 hw/xquartz/X11Application.m | 42 +- hw/xquartz/X11Controller.m | 4 hw/xquartz/darwin.c | 118 -------- hw/xquartz/darwin.h | 1 hw/xquartz/darwinEvents.c | 2 hw/xquartz/mach-startup/bundle-main.c | 141 ++++++--- hw/xquartz/mach-startup/mach_startup.defs | 8 hw/xquartz/mach-startup/stub.c | 105 ++----- hw/xquartz/quartzKeyboard.c | 438 ------------------------------ hw/xquartz/xpr/xprCursor.c | 10 hw/xquartz/xpr/xprFrame.c | 14 miext/rootless/rootlessCommon.h | 2 miext/rootless/rootlessWindow.c | 34 -- 14 files changed, 171 insertions(+), 749 deletions(-)
diffstat is a utility used to summarize patches to source code. The output is a list of files that are changed with the number of lines affected, and a bargraph to the side showing these changes with - symbols used to denote deletion and + used to denote addition. This summary of code changes is quite useful when working on large codebases with many contributors.
