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Shorthand Story: From Novels to Nine-Second Reels: The Attention Swap We Didn’t Notice
My target audience was anyone within the age group 25-30. Additionally, I used the data from the 30-35 age group to draw insights and inferences. The main reason to choose this age group was that I fall into this age group. I wanted to see if I am showing anomalous behavior or if this is the new normal and common trend in people my age.
Another implicit assumption that I made with the data that I had was that everyone was literate enough to read and had access to the internet and social media platforms, so much so that they were part of their lifestyle.
Since part II, I have made quite a number of changes as suggested by my users and my own assessment of how I want the final version to ultimately look. These changes range from cosmetic changes to story design changes. I also refined a couple of my visualisations as suggested and as they seemed fit to me.
The Title:
People liked the title, but one person found the title too snappy or judgmental this one feedback could have been ignored, I did some quick math, when this website goes public, there is a good chance that 15-20% might feel attacked, therefore I decided to change the tile from “We all can read, so why don’t we? Let’s pick a book today!” to “From Novels to Nine-Second Reels: The Attention Swap We Didn’t Notice” this delivered the sentiments in a more neutral and “it makes you ponder” kinda way than making people feel judged.
Background Images:
The moodboard helped, and from the start, I knew I wanted bright colors and an edge to the website for two reasons. Firstly, the book covers come in every possible color you can think of and that adds to their charm. Secondly, social media is all about different styles, colors, and pictures coming together to keep the audience engaged, so it was quite “on brand” in my opinion. It was not as easy as I thought it would be. Finding the right balance between the theme, tone, color, and contrast was a bit tricky to achieve.
There were a few background images that resonated well with the content of that particular page, but did not match the theme of the website overall. So I had to replace them. Being too committed to a background image was not a good strategy, and being flexible with them helped me have a better overall theme and design for the website. The contrast was another issue. Some images were too bright and high contrast, which made the text placed on top of them way too overwhelming and hard to read. Another decision I made was to use mellow shades of yellow and off white for the website. I did, however, sprinkle a few pastel colors here and there throughout the website to it more flavor. Finally, these strategies worked much better and aligned with my overall vision.
Visualizations:
Part II set me up quite well in terms of visualizations. Most of my visualizations stayed the same and turned out pretty good and feasible when I tried to implement them on Tableau. It was “Emotions & What’s Triggering Them?” visualization that I knew was tricky to keep simple. Showcasing all the info that I wanted that visualization to portray was a tough. In Part II, I suggested visualizing it using scatter plots. Which seemed less intuitive when I finally implemented it using Tableau. So I switched to using a bubble graph and was quite content with what I came up with. On the hindsight, I think it was because it was so much better than the scatter plot and made more sense to me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the most obvious one for majoprity of users.
Issues like it was hard to follow and interpret, too much eye movement, and not intuitive at first glance were reported. It was a key component of the story and totally scrapping it off was not an option. I finally decided to settle for the tabular bar chart. That design decluttered the visualization. It also made it easy to follow compared to the previous one. I made sure I used bar colors that were consistent with the color of the app logos so that it is easy to form that mental connection.
Lastly, with my pie chart, there were minor suggestions like having the labelling on the pie would make it easier to follow, which seemed valid and easy to do, and I incorporated that as well.
Call To Action:
I struggled with the call to action the most for mainly two reasons. Firstly, my data, while it had tangible information in various columns, it was just hard to extract the right bits that would fit in my story correctly, and that would eventually support a good call to action. Secondly, as a ripple effect of its previous problem, I had too many directions that could take this into, and finding the one that sat right with me personally and did justice to the story had gotten tricky.
Here, copiolet came in handy to brainstorm ideas and give me more directions. Suggesting “People should read more” seemed too broad, vague, and a lackluster call to action. That’s where I formed the idea to leverage the reading medium data and focus on the calm focus and instant hits trajectory. Where I appealed towards focusing on reducing the friction between reading and the usage of reading materials to make it the “easiest next option” instead of the hardest.
What excited me the most about this topic was to see if my intuition about the social media usage pattern was right. What that means is I was really interested in seeing how people my age are dealing with social media, are the patterns similar to mine? Using medians was very intentional and tactical for me. It clearly showed on what side of the spectrum people were, and where “I” was. To answer my question, I believe I was right in looking at the right place.
Establishing a correlation is a technical detail that I did not go into intentionally because the data was simply not enough. It was enough to give a faint idea about how the environment around us is changing, and keeping an eye out for these changes that creep into our lifestyle without us noticing is crucial.
Initially, when I spoke to my peers about their process, they suggested finding good data first, then building their story around it. It seemed clever and for a bit a thought I should have done that, but I’m glad that I did not. I would not have put in this much effort into my project if it weren’t a topic close to me. Even during the final presentations, I could see the difference when people chose a topic close to their heart and how beautifully everything came around it.
Lastly, I do not have any regrets, but if I had more time, I would have tried to learn Tableau more thoroughly to leverage the power of visualizations better. I am still a little dissatisfied with the visualization that I finally decided on for the “Emotions & What’s Triggering Them?” visualizations. If I had more time, I would have really liked to explore other graph types and see other possibilities to make tweaks.
All in all, I personally feel good about the work that I have put forward with this project. It is authentic to me and resonates with my style and my strong sentiments around the topic that I chose.
I also want to acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot in helping me structure my ideas more coherently and help me polish the elements of the story that could benefit from adding more clarity in terms of text, data, and general insights.