I wanted to get some feedback to people quickly – so the individual feedback isn’t as extensive as I may have hoped. So instead, I am giving the feedback collectively. Each draft should get a comment in the handin – at least with a link to this posting.
Note: the 4/4 means you turned something in. It’s check/no check grading for the drafts.
Overall, I am very impressed by the quick scan that I did – there is a great diversity of assignments, and people are succeeding in many different ways. There are lots of different designs, and considerations of different tasks. Many assignments show some really good, deep thinking.
While going through assignments, I made a list of comments I would make. Some of these may apply to you. Even if I specified one or more, the others may be relevant as well. Or maybe you can see some of the problems that you don’t have.
Each is written about one design – it could be one of your designs have this problem, or that many do.
Or, it could be that your work doesn’t actually have this problem, I just thought it did at a quick glance.
(some critiques may be about the set of designs)
- Your design is quite specific to a particular data set or use case. For example, there are map designs (which make some assumptions about what the lines are) – where each line is a map.It’s OK to make highly specialized designs. Just document it. Be clear what are the requirements for when your design is applicable. Describe how your design might generalize.
- Your design/scenario isn’t one that obviously fits the assignment. The assignment is about line chart data (with many lines). It’s not clear how the data you’re describing and/or the design you’re giving fits. You should better explain how your design fits the model, and compare your designs to the standard designs (since the standard designs are a good fit for the data type – they just may not be effective for some tasks).
- Your design you provide is really similar to the standard designs. It’s not clear what the pros/cons are relative to the corresponding standard design. You should make that comparison more explicit.
- Your design doesn’t appear scale well in one of the axes. Try to explain why you think the design scales (or doesn’t, as the case may be).
- Having an experiment design is great – but you may want to add detail. What kind of data might you use for the examples? What kinds of things might you measure? How will you define tasks with measureable correctness?
- I can’t quite figure out what is going on in your design. Usually, this is a sign that the design is interesting (it’s non-standard enough that it isn’t obvious) – but it needs to be described better.
- Be sure to describe the designs in a clear way – and have it be easy to find the descriptions.
- Be careful about using adjacent area encodings for things that are not part/whole relationships.
- Consider spacing for the lasagna plots or some other method to make the rows more distinct.
- Using eye tracking for evaluation can be tricky.
- Make clear what you have implemented, and what is a mockup.
- Be sure to document how to run things and what tools/libraries were used.
- Your design is really simple, a very minor tweak on the standard. This is OK, if it has some other good feature to go along with it.
- Your discussion seems to focus on a single, small example. At least discuss how your designs scale, and why this single small example isn’t well served by the traditional designs.
- Your designs seem very similar. You may want to contrast them, and explain why you need multiple designs.
- I’m not sure I quite understand the task you describe, please elaborate/clarify.
- Comparison in a stacked chart can be hard since there is no common baseline.
- Designs that show one time at a time serve very limited tasks – be sure to consider what they can and cannot do.
- Try to back up assertions. Saying something is good requires some explanation.
- Discuss tasks as part of critique/comparison.
- It’s not clear how the design connects to the task
- If you’re focused on a single task, be sure to compare/contrast your designs.
- Descriptions and critique are terse.
- Describes cons (as well as pros) for designs.
- Give rationale for designs.
- Give comparisons with baseline designs.
