So last week we met with Submarine again and presented our final visualizations and dashboard for Unspeak. Afterwards, we discussed some questions concerning our work for Unspeak, which mostly were about highlighting problem areas. As we are not the producers of their interactive documentaries, it is very hard for us to determine what exactly would indicate a problem. Therefore, we agreed that the visualization will indicate possible problem zones, instead of highlighting individual datapoints.
Furthermore, we discussed that in order for the visualization to be easy to understand, it is always wise to stay close to the actual shapes of the visualized objects. For instance, we used bubbles to visualize screen resolutions, while screens are obviously square shaped. Using the same shape as the concerning object in the visualization makes them more intelligible for the reader. Overall the meeting went very well and we were happy to find that the guys from Submarine comprehended the work we did on Unspeak and also pointed out a few points of improvement. Note that we decided that actually programming all of the back end stuff (retrieving all data from Google Analytics) and the visualizations for Unspeak will be a very time consuming job. Seeing the fact that we only have two months left, we agreed on documenting all of the work we did for Unspeak into one comprehensive report. If Submarine would like to take up this project somewhere the road, this report will allow them to.
Another reason for not programming Unspeak, is the fact that their new interactive documentary Last Hijack will launch this week. This interactive documentary differs quit a bit from Unspeak and therefore will allow us to capture more data. Not only will we use the correlations that we already used for Unspeak (see below) but for this project we will focus more on capturing custom events. In order to capture this data, Emiel den Tex already did a lot of programming. Using the program Greasemonkey it is possible to program custom dimensions, events and metrics, which can be queried in the Google Query Explorer when captured.
We have now started with formulating meaningful questions, which will help us in order to form correlations which we will then visualize. The data for Last Hijack will be categorized in the same way as we did for Unspeak, namely: Behavior, Acquisition and Technical. Also, we will start an referral research which will focus on examining the internet buzz around Last Hijack. How is the discourse around the project and how is it being spoken about? The research will be divided into two parts; the conversation on Twitter, and using a tool called Google Scraper, we will investigate how different websites write about the project. We are very exited about this, but in order for there to be internet buzz around the project, it should be launched first. Wel’ll keep you posted on that! So, for now, back to correlating.