Peer Review

[gptzjs]

Hi Lesley, Anas, Polina, Xinwen,

Congratulations on producing a really nice app!

Please accept my feedback based on four of the principles of good dashboard design.

1. Aesthetics Matter

First impressions are important and your app does a good job of this through the choices of layout, font style/size, and appropriate use of colour for the text introduction, title, and the plots. Having lived in San Francisco before, my interest was immediately piqued when I saw the title and your clean look just reinforced my motivation to explore further. I also like the 2x2 grid layout which (almost!) allows the user to view all four sections without having to scroll. My only very small suggestion/question in this regard is whether it is possible to scale everything down by say 10-15% so that the whole dashboard fits in a single browser window? I am using Google Chrome and had to reduce to 80% to avoid scrolling -- not a big deal at all but always better if the user does not have to do so!

2. Choose defaults wisely

It was indeed wise to choose all four crime categories as the default in the crime type dropdown as it populates the bar chart with data for all four categories which conveys more information at a single glance and also supports a stronger first impression than if (for example) only one crime category was chosen as the default in which case there would just be one lonely bar and a lot of whitespace. That said, it is also intuitive and easy for a user to click on x to remove categories if she is only interested (for example) in zeroing in on a single crime category and using the slider button to see how the frequency changes by hour of the day. One possible source of confusion is that the bar chart represents the city-wide crime frequencies by hour, but the bars are always displayed using blue coloured bars which in the two plots below represent the district of Bayview. To easily solve this, you could choose a neutral colour not represented by any of the districts (e.g. black) and/or edit the title to avoid any ambiguity (e.g. "San Francisco City-Wide Crimes Per Hour by Crime Category").

3. Build trust in your analysis

As suggested above, visually your app creates an overall positive impression of being well thought-out and this is reinforced by the introduction which makes it clear why the app was created and how it can be used to answer questions that have real-world utility. My suggestion to further build trust with the user would be to clearly state your source. I am sure you got your data from a credible source, but I was quite surprised to see that the notorious Tenderloin district was not among the districts with the highest report counts for any of the crime categories, so I did immediately look for a source. A quick explanation for this is that while Tenderloin is an area with an unsavoury reputation (unlike tenderloin steak), it is also the smallest district in San Francisco by area (and presumably by population). Normalizing the number of crime reports by population in each district (i.e. per capita) would be a good way to compare crime rates across districts. Also, on the introduction, to break up the somewhat dense block of text and separate motivation for the app with a segue into the app itself, you could also consider starting a new paragraph with the sentence beginning with "Our app aims to help people make decisions when considering ... "

4. Less is more

It took me a few looks to realize that despite the clean and simple layout, you actually have a slider and two dropdowns embedded in four plots that are all contained within a single browser window, all of which can be viewed and used without scrolling (assuming I reduce to 80%). Your aesthetics as discussed above have allowed you to produce a dashboard that appears minimalist, but has quite a lot of functionality and most importantly, conveys lots of useful information. Less is more and you seem to have produced more with less! As we have been told repeatedly, the bar is high (no pun intended) for using animation so I immediately wondered whether it would have been a good idea to include one for the bar chart to allow the user to press a button and watch crime evolve over a 24 hour period, but moving the slider does the same thing and avoids adding another feature which could risk cluttering the layout, so I think it was good choice to keep it out if you were thinking about that :-)

I enjoyed using your app and learned new things (e.g. I didn't realize Mission had such a high assault count) so great job and see you in Block 4!

George