The first thing I did was to draw Boston’s map to check from which neighborhoods are these speakers. Does wealth play a big role in where these issues are happening? I was trying to figure it out what is the data telling me.

Then I started sketching how this visualization would look like. I started thinking of the most used themes throughout these conversations and how can I visualize them. I thought of the most used words in these conversations, but I realized that wouldn’t be an accurate representation of this data.

Then I thought of designing a lot of rectangles where each meant one conversation and the lines show how these conversations are connected to each other. Each little highlighted rectangle represents a specific theme that was found in those conversations. This design that got chosen to be implemented because it showed our audience the total amount of the conversations and it allowed users to see an overview of all the main issues.

These are some of the initial mock-ups that we created to collect feedback.

RTFC Data Visualization

RTFC Portal