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Project 2.5: Visualization Critique

In this short assignment, your team will find a data visualization “in the wild,” critique it using the vocabulary from Lectures 1–6, and pitch your critique to the class in a 3-minute elevator pitch at the Project 2.5 Showcase. During the showcase, your team will peer review other teams’ pitches.

This is a group assignment — stay in your Project 2 teams. The peer review is also done as a team: one response per team.

Team Submission Due: Thu 10/29, by 10:00am (before lecture)

Showcase: Thu 10/29, in lecture

Peer Review Due: the end of the showcase

Table of contents

Designing a visualization and critiquing one are the same skill pointed in opposite directions. In Project 2 you made deliberate choices about transformation, encoding, color, and framing, and you had to justify each of them. Here you will reconstruct someone else’s reasoning from the finished artifact alone: naming the marks and channels they chose, judging whether those choices worked, and explaining why — all in three minutes.

Your Tasks

  1. Find a visualization. As a team, select at least one interesting data visualization that has not already been shown in lecture, labs, or a project. It can come from a news outlet, a scientific paper, a dashboard, a government report, a social media post, a company’s marketing page — anywhere. It does not have to be good; a “not-so-great” visualization often makes for the most instructive critique. If the dataset behind the visualization is publicly available, find it and include a link.

  2. Analyze it using concepts from Lectures 1–6: the value of visualization, data and image models, visual encoding (expressiveness and effectiveness), dark patterns and deception, perception, and color. Your analysis must cover:

    • (a) Marks and channels. Identify the marks and the visual channels used to encode each data attribute, and the data type of each attribute (nominal, ordinal, quantitative).
    • (b) Strengths. What does this visualization do well, and why? Tie each strength to a specific design choice and to a lecture concept — “the diverging color scale makes the zero crossing legible at a glance,” not “the colors are nice.”
    • (c) Weaknesses. What does it do poorly, and why? Tie each weakness to a lecture concept, explain what it costs the reader, and, where you can, suggest what you would change.

  3. Prepare your elevator pitch. Build a single slide containing the visualization, and annotate the visualization directly (see The Elevator Pitch).

  4. Submit your slide and links to Gradescope before lecture on Thursday 10/29, then present at the Project 2.5 Showcase.

  5. Peer review other teams’ pitches as a team (see Peer Review).

The Elevator Pitch

Your team will deliver a 3-minute pitch of your critique at the showcase.

  • 3 minutes, hard stop. We will keep time, and you will be cut off at 3:00 so that every team gets to present.
  • One slide: the visualization itself. No bullet-point or text-only slides. The only additions allowed are annotations on the visualization — arrows, circles, highlights, and short labels that point at the marks, channels, strengths, and weaknesses you are talking about.

Practice out loud and time yourselves. Three minutes goes quickly; decide in advance which one or two points matter most for each of strengths and weaknesses.

Submission Details

Team Submission

One Gradescope group submission per team, due Thursday 10/29 by 10:00am (before the first lecture section), containing:

  1. Your annotated slide, as a single-page PDF. This is the slide we will project during the showcase, so submit the final version.
  2. A link to the original source of the visualization.
  3. A link to the dataset, if one is publicly available.
  4. The full name and UCSD email of every team member.

Slip days cannot be used on Project 2.5. The submission is due the same day as the in-class showcase, and we need every team’s slide in order to run the session.

Showcase

On Thursday, October 29, lecture is the Project 2.5 Showcase. Each team presents in the lecture section its members are enrolled in. If your team spans both sections (with prior approval), present in either one and note which on your Gradescope submission.

Attendance is expected for every team member, and every member should be prepared to speak. Otherwise your team will receive 0pt. While other teams present, take notes — you will need them for your peer review.

Peer Review

This part is also done in groups. You will finish this part, with your team, in class.

During the showcase, your team reviews the three pitches it watches as the audience in the last 3 slots of each half of the rotation (the peer-review slots). Your team’s itinerary on the showcase rotation page lists exactly which teams you review. For each, give constructive feedback on their pitch using the “I like / I wish / What if?” format: positive feedback on effective aspects, critical (but respectful!) feedback on what could be improved, and more speculative ideas they could have explored. Consider:

  • Did they identify the marks and channels correctly and completely?
  • Were the strengths and weaknesses tied to specific design choices and to concepts from lecture, or did they stay general?
  • Did their critique change how you read the visualization?
  • Were the annotations on the slide clear and helpful?

For each of the three teams, write at least two statements in each of the I like / I wish / What if? categories — at least 6 statements per team and at least 18 in total.

Each team submits just one response to the Project 2.5 Peer Review Google Form during class, with one section for each of the three teams you review. Sign in with your UCSD account; the form only accepts UC San Diego accounts.

Grading

The team portion is scored out of a maximum of 14 points, and the peer review out of 1 point.

ComponentExcellentSatisfactoryPoor
Marks and ChannelsMarks and channels are identified correctly and completely, with the data type each channel encodes. Dataset is linked where one is public.
(3 points)		Marks and channels are mostly correct, but some encodings are missed or mislabeled.
(2 points)		Marks and channels are missing or largely incorrect.
(1 point)
StrengthsIdentifies real strengths and ties each to a concrete design choice and a named concept from Lectures 1–6.
(4 points)		Identifies real strengths, but the reasoning stays general (“it’s clear,” “the colors work”) or the lecture connection is surface-level.
(3 points)		Strengths are asserted without support, or are not actually strengths.
(1.5 points)
WeaknessesIdentifies substantive weaknesses, ties each to a concept from Lectures 1–6, explains the cost to the reader, and proposes plausible alternatives.
(4 points)		Identifies real weaknesses, but stops short of explaining the cost or suggesting a fix.
(3 points)		Weaknesses are nitpicks, or the critique is uncritical.
(1.5 points)
Elevator PitchPitch finishes within 3 minutes and covers all required content. The slide is the visualization with clear annotations that support what is being said.
(3 points)		Pitch runs over or skips required content, or the annotations add little.
(2 points)		Pitch is missing, or the slide is not the annotated visualization.
(0 points)
OriginalityYou found something nobody else would have, or read it in a way the rest of us hadn’t considered.
(up to +1 bonus point)		You met all the parameters of the assignment.
(0 points)		–

Peer review (1 point, group): full credit for three complete reviews that meet the minimum number of statements and are specific to each pitch.

Where to Look

You are free to find a visualization anywhere. If you want starting points: