UX Research Analysis
My first idea was to do research in the colours to use in our word weight most of my original research is based of off this source which is a guide made by Datawrapper which is a company focused on developing charts for newspapers. The guide went into to detail on how to pick a good palette for your charts while providing excellent online tools such as Chroma.js color scale helper and Viz Palette that I used to define a better colour identity for our palette originally basing it off the analogous color harmony of red green the Color scale helper helped me mix the colours to be distinct from each other while the Viz Palette tool allowed me to visualize more clearly how it would look.
This is the look I settled on for the green-red hue differentiation for the word cloud. My decision was made based on the colour step chart provided by the tool and looking at the comments made by the Viz Palette tool and the visualization it showed with the colours I have picked. The colour scale is not completely colorblind friendly to make it more appropriate the Green needs to be changed to a blue hue something we could possibly provide as an option.
Originally the research topic was more to focus on overall Data visualization but since our focus is review visualization I am going to focus on the area of Data Vis.
There are a number of visual exploration tools specifically designed for text data, including:
- Word clouds like Wordle (fun but superficial);
- Network diagrams like Visual Thesaurus (good for individual words, not text);
- Trend graphs like Baby Name Voyager or Google Trends;
- Granular presentations for interacting and exploring individual phrases, e.g. We Feel Fine and Twistori
- "Word trees" that let you navigate through lines of text to understand the most frequent words, relationships between words, and common phase and sentence structures.
The simplest and most common form of text visualization is a tag (or word) cloud. They depict tags arranged in space varied in size, color, and position based on tag frequency, categorization, or significance.
This - Explains well the value of word clouds and how to accurately use them in summary word clouds could be useful if used sparingly and with proper use of color in fonts to provide a quick insight but over all their usefulness even when used properly is questionable.
For word clouds we have 2 options we can either show the word cloud for the business it self showing the most commonly used words across all reviews or to show single word clouds per review showing the general use of each individual reviewer. From my research I found that showing general opinion would be more useful with word cloud as it would help to show if the reviews are generally negative or positive.
Words Trees are used for creating a tree to visualize the most coming path a phrase would take when discussion a particular topic or to show hierarchy of terms.