Let’s talk about longitudinals and data visualization.
While I’m familiar with lots of different methodologies, longitudinals hold a special place in my heart. And over the last ten years, I’ve gotten pretty good at them.
My introduction to them was when I first saw Napoleon’s March in grad school. While I was studying information design and user research, I had never thought about tracking a user over a long period of time and, most importantly, visualizing it in such a clear and concise way, and making it so beautiful.
While I’ve executed various types of longitudinals over the years with various lengths and goals, and all visualized differently, my most recent visualization is obviously inspired by this.
This is a generic recreation of a visualization I created to illustrate a specific type of longitudinal I’ve created and conducted over the years, starting at YouTube.
The longitudinal’s base is a daily survey taken by 100+ participants for 30 days. The participants are paid regardless if they use the app/play the game after the first 72 hours; they just have to take the survey everyday.
The survey is very short and asks what they did in the product and how they felt about it. If they didn’t use the product, it asks why not and what they did instead.
Interviews are injected into the 30 days with select participants and I might have a roundtable discussion at the end.
I’ve run more than a dozen of this specific type over my career and they’re very effective and impactful.
I’ve picked up my data viz and information design skills through reading and practice. But also I’v’e been very fortunate to have had designers take time out of their workday to teach and advise me.
If you ever need inspiration for information design or data visualizattion, might I recommend W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.
It’s truly inspiring and was all done by hand circa 1900…gathering the data back then must have been rough.
Here’s one of the data visualizations from Visualizing Black America.
