Firework

A visualization of movie data that help users identify major trends based on year, country of production as well as genre of the movie.

Why?

I worked with a team on a creative project to implement an information visualization by collecting data, designing the system, and visualizing it. The goal of this project is to help people in the film industry in decision making when importing movie from the other countries. Under the globalization trend, movies production increases all over the world. Hollywood isn’t the only resources. However, existing systems or applications only present discrete data of individual movies. We tried to answer the following questions: How do movie popularity and ratings differ from one country to another? For a specific country, how does each genre differ from one another in terms of popularity and rating? 

Process

We started with multiple sketches as our design solution. As a team we came up with two solutions. As the solutions involved, we develop “Fireworks” that adds some playfulness in it and at the same time clearly conveys the data. Users can start by filtering country group or search for a specific country. The graph will show only the dot that is being filtered and searched. After that, by clicking on a country dot, it shows the spreading “firework” which each dot represents one genre from that country re-using the same x-axis(popularity) and y-axis(rating). The beneath bar and line chart reflects the trend of rating and popularity of that country over 50 years. It also allows users to filter by genre. 

Ideation 

I tried a couple ideas using line, size, color, bar to visualize move rating by genre over time. As you can see in the picture, each line represent each genre, and the size of circle stands for the number of votes. So you can see overtime, how each genre becomes popular or drop.

User Testing

We did an evaluation on how users use and react to our system. We recruited 10 users from different background. Fireworks assists better decision making by allowing the comparison between countries and among genres. The filter and search function add more possibility for locating desired country group. However, there are more potential optimization that our system can improve on.

• Better labeling and interaction with firework such as closing it or transition from one firework to another.
• Locating desired countries is not as easy as we expected

Result

We update our design based on the feedback from user testing, including better labeling with country and genre, and make country selection more prominent and noticeable. 

Here is the final version of Firework, feel free to play around and let me know what you think!