I came across this paper by Seim and Spates (2010) during my research and thought the data presented would be a good fit for this project, as well as my own interests.
Seim, R. W., & Spates, C. R. (2010). The Prevalence and Comorbidity of Specific Phobias in College Students and Their Interest in Receiving Treatment. Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, 24(1), 49-58. 10.1080/87568220903400302.
The main user groups are people who are interested in learning more about specific phobias and/or people who have specific phobias who want to learn more about them and about possible treatment options.
Key user needs:
These are 54 sketches I made of possible data visualization designs and design elements.
I chose to move forward with the layered bar graphs to visualize Table 1 and Table 3 and for Table 2 I created several options to user test, in order to see which layouts the participants responded to the best.
I also chose to move forward with the monster character shown on page 8, but it later evolved into the dinosaur mascot character.
I created multiple versions of the webpage layout, treatment options section, and comorbidity section, so that users could give me feedback on which versions they preferred and why.
In this prototype I added more design elements, such as colours, the dinosaur character, buttons, and typography.
I narrowed down the comorbidity visualization and treatment options visualization options based off of user feedback, and added the option for users to hide and reveal a sidebar with information about specific phobias displayed on the full webpage.
User testing shaped the result of this project greatly. I came into this project with some ideas of how to visualize my dataset, but there were many things that I overlooked and came to realize during the user testing process.
I made many changes with each revision of the prototype, and ideally I think one more round of user testing would have been helpful to gain insight into the design choices I made in the final prototype.
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