Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Visualization Design Rationale

In designing the visual encodings and interaction techniques for this educational pathways visualization project, our goal was to provide clear, intuitive insights into how different education pathways lead to varied employment outcomes. We chose a histogram to represent salary distributions because it effectively illustrates the range and frequency of earnings within each category, enabling a comparative analysis across different fields of study and degrees. The histogram's interactive tooltips were implemented to provide additional granularity and detail on demand.

The bubble chart was selected to visualize job outcomes, as its format naturally allows for the representation of two dimensions - the type of job and the frequency of each job within the selected filters. The size of each bubble corresponds to the job count, providing an immediate visual cue to the user regarding the relative prevalence of each role. Unique colors for each bubble were used to distinguish between different jobs, and we incorporated interactive elements like bolding text to allow users to explore and engage with the data further.

While considering alternatives, a pie chart was also evaluated for job distribution, but we found that a bubble chart offered a more scalable and readable solution, especially when dealing with a large number of job categories. Moreover, a pie chart was later used to depict employment status distributions to effectively communicate part-to-whole relationships. The pie chart used for visualizing employment status is made clearer by specifying the percentage and count that each slice makes up because it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the sizes of slices in a pie chart. This pie chart is clearer than one would be for the job categories because there are only three values the variable can take.

Development Process Overview

The development of our application was a collaborative effort, with team members focusing on different aspects of the project. Kai was primarily responsible for the code behind the histogram and bubble chart, employing D3.js to bring the data to life. Sukham contributed to both the bubble chart and the CSS styling, ensuring that the visual presentation was both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Justin added the pie chart and helped with debugging tooltips when they weren't functioning properly.

Our development process was iterative and agile, with frequent check-ins to discuss progress, troubleshoot issues, and refine our visualizations. In total, we estimate that the project took approximately 15-20 person-hours to complete. Before we began the visualization, cleaning the data and selecting the variables we wanted to use was very time consuming. The IPUMS dataset has a lot of variables available that we could explore, and each was encoded with integers rather than strings, which had to be re-encoded to make the data useable for this visualization. The most time-consuming aspect of the visualization was perfecting interactivity of the visualizations, particularly ensuring that the bubble chart was informative, non-overlapping, and responsive to user input. Attention to detail in the visual encoding and interaction design required the majority of our development time.

We believe the final product effectively communicates the intended insights and allows users to explore the impact of education on career outcomes. We hope this visualization serves as a valuable tool for students, educators, and policymakers alike.