Milestone 2: Marshall Crime App Review

The user experience of this app feels more like a web app than a standalone visualization app. You can click on 4 tabs in the header to see different views (geographical map, scatter plot, table), and you can download city-specific crime data. After testing out the app, it seems like the main purpose of the app is to investigate general crime trends across major cities in the U.S.
The colours were user-friendly, and accessible for those who are colourblind.
The app had many components to it, but was well thought-out in its design and overall flow.

The app has a lot of text, and instructions on how to navigate through the app. Some users (including myself) may be lazy and skip over text. For example, in the Map view, I didn’t realize that I could click on the bubbles to retrieve more information about crime in that particular city. I learned afterwards that the side panel had instructions on how to click the bubbles. A couple of suggestions: 1) increase font size of instruction, or 2) make interaction more intuitive - could show information directly on hover, rather than having to click it.
Aesthetic mapping of the bubbles on Map view is confusing. As a user, we’re trying to juggle between interpreting the size of bubble and colour of the bubble. Adding a legend to explain what size and colour represent could help solve this.
Slider for adjusting year in Map view is misleading. When you slide the circle to the right, the growing blue line suggests that the map represents data for a range of years rather than a specific year. One suggestion is to remove this blue line from the slider (if possible), or change the input widget to a radio button or dropdown.
Trends view: The side panel has text indicating the scale of the plot’s y-axis (100k/city), but it’s not obvious. I suggest adding this to the main panel, or even incorporating it into your app (e.g., update y-axis to say '# crimes per 100k people'.

akshi8 / US_Crime_Report