visualizing migration

a black and white screenshot of a group of people at ellis island with overlayed text saying 'Work in the USA, the past decade of US workvisas in numbers'

context

This is my group final project for CS171: Visualization at Harvard.

problem

How can we visualize trends in US visas over the past decade in a way that is interactive and story-based?

interact

You can explore the visualizations here.

Unfortunately, the project isn't available on mobile right now. Check back later or explore on your desktop!

process

This project was created in an intensive sprint over the course of 3 weeks in November 2018.

In the first week, we compiled a number of open datasets from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. We then explored the data in Tableau and sketched out storyboards to drive the design process.

In the final two weeks of the sprint we wireframed and built the website, including usability testing at the end.

hand drawn sketches of six pages illustrating the storyboarding process

Sketching the initial interaction storyboard.

tools

JavaScript
JQuery
D3.js
HTML + CSS
R
Python
Tableau

team

Prathapan Thiru
Celena Toon
Elyse Voegeli

learnings

We did not prioritize user testing throughout our design process. As a result, we went through too few iteration cycles with our final project and the interactions were not as intuitive as we hoped. Retrospectively, we might have focused on fewer but more rigorously tested visualizations.