Shivam

Telling Stories With Data - Final Project: Part 3


After every fall, there is a rise...

A ray of hope for CMU Heinz Graduates in these times of layoffs.

Final Project Presentation - Link to Shorthand Storyboard


Summary

Project Part 1

  • In part 1 of the project, I decided upon the topic of the project. Since these are challenging times and students at Heinz college at Carnegie Mellon University were worried about the recent layoffs, I chose to address their fear and show them hope.
  • I finalized the project structure. Having a Story Arc gave an excellent skeleton to the project.
  • Since I wanted to address the anxiety of the master's students at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, they were naturally the primary audience for the project. Hence, I decided to structure my thoughts for the project in a way that would help deliver the message appropriately.
  • Moving ahead, I collected the relevant data and cleaned them to fit my needs. Following the data preparation, I built initial sketches for my story and later improvised them using Flourish.
  • Finally, I decided upon the tools to help me prepare and deliver my message effectively. I settled to use Flourish and Tableau to create the final visualizations, Shorthand to build the narrative for the project, and Unsplash to get some valuable images for the narrative.

Project Part 2

  • The second part of the project began with building a storyboard for the project. As planned, I used Shorthand to build my narrative.
  • I incorporated the visualizations (built using Flourish and Tableau) into the storyboard and added relevant text and images to the narrative to create a compelling story.
  • After building my narrative, I reached out to three CMU Heinz graduate students for feedback on the storyboard. Since my target audience was CMU's Heinz graduates, it was appropriate for me to reach out to current Heinz graduates for feedback.
  • Before reaching out to the interviewees, I prepared an interview script with a list of questions. I prepared different questions with the intent to understand different aspects of the storyboard and the message it was trying to convey.
  • After updating the storyboard with the feedback received, the storyboard went through another round of review by my peers in the class. Multiple rounds of feedback were the best way to improve my work.
  • Finally, after receiving all the feedback, I laid out the plan for Part 3 of the project, particularly noting the changes I had to make in the project.

Project Part 3

  • Coming to the project's final stage, my storyboard underwent various improvements using the feedback received from Part 2.
  • I built the pre-final version of my storyboard and let it undergo another round of feedback from my peers, the course teaching assistant, and my intended audience (four Heinz graduates - different from the ones chosen in Part 2).
  • As expected, the storyboard performed much better in these final rounds of feedback. However, I did receive some constructive feedback. I incorporated the new suggestions and built the final version of my storyboard.
  • As a requirement for Part 3 of the project, I delivered a 60 seconds presentation (like a catchy commercial) of the project to the class. The presentation went great and was deeply appreciated in the class by the professor, our teaching assistant, and my peers.
  • The final aspect of Part 3 was to reflect on the project and note down the changes that were incorporated while building the final narrative.

Changes Made in Project Part 3

  • Quite a lot of feedback received was related to images used in the storyboard. In particular, the images of dogs I used for transitions did not work very well. My intention in using the relevant images of dogs in the transitions was to add a comic touch to the presentation, but it came out to be a bit distracting and not so relevant to the audience. So, I removed the images of dogs used for transitions and replaced them with other relevant images.
  • Apart from the images of the dogs, I updated the images at a few other places, as suggested in the feedback (including the title page and my call to action section of the narrative).
  • I improved the use of colors in the narrative and decided to use as less color variation as possible. It helped me stay true to my theme and brought lesser distractions. My primary color choice was maroon (#a52a2a) and black.
  • I reduced the use of excessive exclamation marks ('!') in the narrative. It helped soften the storyboard's text and made it look more natural.
  • I updated the title, "What's in the air at the renowned CMU's Heinz College?" to "What's in the air for December 2022 graduates?" since the story described in the section represents the scenario for most December 2022 graduates.
  • The slide summarising the news clipping was updated to a single sentence rather than three separate and distracting bullet points. The updated sentence is - "All we hear today in the news, social media, and CMU's Heinz College is "layoffs" 😖"
  • I improved the transitions among the slides and removed distracting interruptions such as "Where is the hope?", "It's Worth The Wait", "But if this hope did not meet your expectations ... There is more hope.", "If you are still not satisfied ..."
  • Another significant change to the storyboard was in the call-to-action section. I made this final section more focused and detailed. I added links to various helpful resources that the audience can access immediately. In particular, I added resources to reach out to CMU Alumni on LinkedIn and CMUniverse.
  • I colored the circles representing the leading tech hubs (in the US) in the circle graph with marron to highlight that they were the most affected by the layoffs.
  • Moreover, I enlarged the graph comparing the unemployment rates with the recession periods to fit the entire screen. The enlarged version enables us to understand the trends in the graph better. It also helped remove the unnecessary footer (requesting the users to enlarge the graph) that was present below the graph.
  • As a final update, I double-checked (and added) references and citations to the narrative.
  • I was planning to update the line chart, which compared the salaries of Heinz graduates and other US graduates. Based on the feedback, I was planning to add a line of average salary for Heinz graduates instead of showing all the salaries for all Heinz programs. But, after trying that out, it felt that the purpose of the graph was defeated. I wanted to show my audience that graduates from all the top Heinz programs earn better than the other US graduates on average. A single average line and a drop-down (on the line chart) to compare the salaries of other programs did not satisfy the purpose. With just one average line (salaries of Heinz graduates) and the overall US line (salaries of US graduates in general), the graph felt empty as all the Heinz programs were not distinctly represented. So, I did not move ahead with this decision.
  • Similarly, another suggestion was to highlight important words in the initial long story I had under the section, "What's in the air at the renowned CMU's Heinz College?" I did the same, but with the choice of image and multiple highlighting in various sentences, it became distracting. So, I did not move forward with that suggestion as well.

Intended Audience and Related Changes

  • Since the start, my intended audience has been CMU's Heinz graduates. Hence, I made the following changes in Part 3 further to narrow my focus to the intended audience.
  • As an additional visualization, I added a graph showing the employment statistics of Heinz graduates during the time of COVID (which was a recession period as well). Since most Heinz graduates were placed during the unfortunate COVID recession, it added great hope for my audience (Heinz graduates).
  • I limited the use of multiple colors as much as possible and used two colors, maroon (#a52a2a) and black, to give the CMU touch to the narrative.
  • For most of the visualizations, I added a sentence summarising the primary point of the visualization in maroon. The text in the primary point was focused on CMU's Heinz graduates.
  • A significant update for my primary audience was the addition of valuable resources to my call-to-action section. These resources focused on helping them prepare for their job hunt and maintain good health during these stressful times.

References for the Project

  1. “Google's plan to lay off 10,000 'poor performing' employees is based on ...” [Online]. Available: https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-plan-to-lay-off-10000-poor-performing-employees-is-based-on-a-big-lie-according-toharvard-professor.html. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  2. Ashleycapoot, “Amazon reportedly plans to lay off about 10,000 employees starting this week,” CNBC, 15-Nov-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/amazon-reportedly-plans-to-lay-off-about-10000-employees-starting-this-week.html. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  3. D. O'Sullivan and C. Duffy, “Elon Musk's Twitter lays off employees across the company | CNN business,” CNN, 09-Nov-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/index.html. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  4. Eduardo munoz and Reuters, “Layoffs hit white-collar workers as Amazon, Walmart, others cut jobs,” The Wall Street Journal, 08-Dec-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.wsj.com/articles/layoffs-hit-white-collar-workers-as-amazon-walmart-others-cut-jobs-11669930249. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  5. S. D. Avery Hartmans, “Buzzfeed is reportedly cutting 12% of its workforce. Here are the other major US companies that have made cuts so far, from Amazon to Twitter.,” Business Insider. [Online]. Available: https://www.businessinsider.com/layoffs-sweeping-the-us-these-are-the-companies-making-cuts-2022-5. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  6. Stephanie Dhue, “Job cuts rise in November, causing employees to shift focus to 'career cushioning' ,” CNBC, 02-Dec-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/01/employees-to-shift-focus-to-career-cushioning-as-job-cuts-rise.html. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  7. K. Vedantam, “Tech layoffs: US Startups and tech companies with job cuts in 2022,” Crunchbase News, 09-Dec-2022. [Online]. Available: https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  8. “Employment information & salary statistics,” Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College. [Online]. Available: https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/current-students/career-services/employment-information-salary-statistics. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  9. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2021,” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. [Online]. Available: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_502.30.asp. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  10. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 09-Dec-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.bls.gov/. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  11. “Dates of U.S. recessions as inferred by GDP-based recession indicator,” FRED, 28-Oct-2022. [Online]. Available: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JHDUSRGDPBR. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  12. “CMUniverse,” Peoplegrove. [Online]. Available: https://cmuniverse.peoplegrove.com/v2/. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  13. C. M. University, “Caps - counseling and psychological services (CAPS) - division of student affairs - carnegie Mellon University,” CaPS - Counseling and Psychological Services (CaPS) - Division of Student Affairs - Carnegie Mellon University. [Online]. Available: https://www.cmu.edu/counseling/. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]
  14. C. M. University, “Resources - Community Health & Well-being - student affairs - carnegie Mellon University,” Resources - Community Health & Well-Being - Student Affairs - Carnegie Mellon University. [Online]. Available: https://www.cmu.edu/wellbeing/resources/index.html. [Accessed: 09-Dec-2022]

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