Sprint 2: National, State, and Local Data

Research plan

• Sprint 2 Plan🔒
• Sprint 2 Conversation Guide🔒
• Sprint 2 Folder🔒

User group

A member of the general public.

Priorities

Key questions

• How do people expect to navigate and interact with crime data?
• What filters are appropriate for certain types of data sets? How should they behave and interact?
• How does filtering apply to maps and charts?
• How could caveats be presented as part of the results view?
• If users decide to export a result as a CSV, how do they expect the dataset to be structured? Should it include more data than what is displayed by the results view, or the same?
• In what ways might participants use CSV files exported from the CDE?
• How would participants use the exports to go about making comparisons between the data sets?

Scenario

After watching the presidential debate, Nate, an undecided voter from Philadelphia, wants to understand if violent crime is up or down. To do this, he compares violent crime rates for his city and state to the nation over a 10 year period (2004–2014). After looking at the data he wants to further understand who are the victims in his city within that timeframe.

Key quotes

“This is hellllla simple.”

“I’m a visual person - my eyes went straight to the map. I didn’t read anything else.”

“When I see graphs, the first thing I do is try to figure out what the graph is saying and then I go back and try to figure out what the writing is saying.”

“Make the top of the page relevant to what I’m looking for.”

“Before I download something, I want to quickly scan it and decide whether or not I really need that chart or graph.”

“Make it so that I don’t have to do any math.”

What we learned

• If there's a map, people interpret it as a map of crime data.

• Show charts at the top, any context statements below or off to the side.

Next steps

• What does it mean if people can share this content so easily on social media? (We can’t access it so we tend to frown on it.)

• We heard less about going straight to the data with this round of participants, was this because of who we spoke to, or did the UI offer more in it’s presentation that made downloading the data less important?