Visualizing independent projects relatively

October 3, 2005 4:43 PM

I have a bunch of tasks I can rank by imminence, completeness, and rate of activity. Is there an interesting or useful way to visualize them rather than three sorted lists?

Say I have 10 projects. Here are some ways I think about them:

Imminence: How soon I plan to have it done.
Activity: Stalled, Irregular progress, Regular progress, maybe a fourth category.
Completedness: basically an arbitrary measure, like 0%–100% in chunks of 10% perhaps.

Some other ways I group them are:
Stage: considering, planning, doing.
Significance: how large a project it is.
Neither of these two are necessary to account for, though. The stage thing might just be clutter.

I'm basically considering something along the lines of: a set of boxes, using y-axis for imminence, x-axis for completedness, color shade for activity and size for significance. Ideas?

Some details: This is not to help me prioritize them, more to survey the field. All these projects are software or code related.

posted by Firas to grab bag (5 comments total)

Well, you have 3 variables, so you could plot them in 3D and classify projects by what octant they're in. For example, all dots in blah octant are projects that have low rate of activity and are less then halfway done, but are imminent. You could just range your answers from -10 to 10 (or 0-10 minus 5) and get a nice looking cube. I'm not sure what you can use to plot it nicely, quick google searches are givin' me nothin'. If you're committed and a programmer, you can always use python with vpython.
posted by Mach5 at 5:32 PM on October 3, 2005

Or, since one of your variables is time, you could generate animations of some sort.
posted by phrontist at 6:33 PM on October 3, 2005

Depending on how much work you want to put into these visualizations, I say combine all three. In a 3-D space: imminence is represented by how close the task's avatar is to the viewer; completedness is shown by the amount of the avatar currently visible*; activity can be spinning, bouncing, etc. (like phrontist's animations).

*Overall size of each tasks' avatar is relative - larger tasks have larger avatars. Completedness should take the form of a partially visible avatar - but it needs to be obvious how big the avatar will be when completed (think moon phases - even if the moon appears as a sliver, you know about how much of a full moon it is, because you know the size and shape of a full moon). One might use shadows or dotted outlines to represent the uncompleted portions of a task so that the currently-completed size is easily comparable to the fully-completed size.
posted by attercoppe at 8:08 PM on October 3, 2005

Good ideas, guys. Unfortunately 3d is out of the question, not just because of my abyssymal lack of skills in that area but also that I'm looking for a 'friendly representation' (i.e., to show other people). So although three dimensional agitating spheres are a great way to model/investigate data, they're not really a way to summarize it, perhaps.

I have a feeling that I'm approaching this the wrong way (charting shapes), that what I need is perhaps a list of text items with ways to convey each of the things (sort by imminence, tint the name for activity level, a little bar chart next to each for completedness? I'm not a huge fan of the way some 'tag maps' change font size to indicate things).
posted by Firas at 8:53 PM on October 3, 2005

Generally, you want to map each variable into something as intuitive as possible. So my suggestions would be:

1. Each item is a rectangle, with each rectangle on its own row. Then, the variables can shown be as follows.
   
2. Imminence: position on the x-axis. The x-axis often represents time, so it would be intuitive that items farther to the right are, well, farther out.
   
3. Activity: almost definitely color. It's a categorical variable that has some scale as you described it, but it could easily become less orderable with more categories.
   
4. Completedness: Well, you mean progress, right? So I would use a horizontal progress bar, perhaps along the bottom of the item, easily read as a percentage of the total item width.
   
5. Stage: This is another category with some scale. You could use color, but it seems better to just group like items. Have all of the "considering" items in consecutive rows, with a simple line separating them from the "planning" items in the next group, etc. This gives you some visual indication along a scale (the y-axis), but doesn't force it to be a scalar measure.
   
6. Significance: Size is an obvious, intuitive indication of significance, but you can't overdo it. You want to be able to see everything at once, and each item has about the same amount of text or other content (I assume), so large size differences would either lead to wasted space, reduced visibility, or both. Possibly just have a small range of font sizes for the titles, from 12pt to 16pt (or any range with that percent difference). If you don't like the font size change, then try something like the rectangle's border thickness or a system of stars (1 to 5 "stars" per item) as other quickly visible indications.
   

Hopefully some of those ideas lead you in interesting directions. Maybe a different pairing of indicators with variables would work better for you. Be careful about displaying too much information at once, though. Maybe have a few modes, where the item color can represent different variables (with a different pallette for each variable!) depending on a selection.
posted by whatnotever at 9:33 PM on October 3, 2005