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Team Members

1. Zening Qu [email protected]
2. Nina(Zhuxiaona) Wei [email protected]

Project Name

How much money goes to farmers' pocket in your grocery spending? -- Visualization of USDA "Price Spreads from Farm to Consumer"dataset

This visulization aims to show users the comparison of retail price and farm price of those common food in grocery, particulay, the year span 2000-2012. Users could be able to input their own customized quantities of food, and to see the retail and farm price, as well as the farm/retail percentages, from two perspectives -- line chart and stacked bar.

Running Instructions

Access our visualization at http://students.washington.edu/zqu/512A3/lines.html or download this repository and run python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9000 and access this from http://localhost:9000/.

The working demo should look like this.

Story Board

Please see our storyboard here.

Changes between Storyboard and the Final Implementation

A biggest change between storyboard and the final implementation is that we decided not to visulize the basket datasets. After careful study and analysis, we found that the data of baskets represents the CPI value. While, our goals is to help consumer to check the gap between retail and farm price. It seemed that visualize the basket datasets is not that meaningful. What is worse, it also would bring confusion to users.

Also, we changed elements of the graphic design, visualization layouts etc.

Development Process

Our development process and time spending

1. Searched datasets and then brainstormed visualizations for several candidate datasets. 3h
2. Understood and analyzed the final dataset, and then transformed and filtered the data. 8h
3. Setted goals and initial questions, at the same time, brainstormed and sketched for the visualization. 5h
4. Created low-fidelity prototype (sketching), and high-fidelity prototype (tableau). 4h
5. Criqued and iterated the prototypes. 5h
6. Developed the visualization. 40h
7. Final Documentation write-up. 5h

Group corporation

We worked all together during the whole process except the coding part. Zening did almost all the coding work. With no experiene in coding, Nina spent a lot of time to learn Javascript and D3 before, but only contributed a little into the development because of the time intense. Nina conducted the storyboard, documentation write-up, and the graphic design.

Develop the visualization took the most time, and then study the data also took a lot of time.