Process Visualization Reflection

This project (like Charles Minard’s timeline showing Napoleon’s March) is intended to show the audience - through a single visual - issues related to NBA basketball’s “One and Done” rule.  Under the current NBA structure, basketball players must be one year removed from high school before being eligible for the draft (the “One and Done” rule).  My research revealed that players who start their professional career younger have longer and more successful playing careers.  I was trying to highlight this issue by contrasting the professional career of a 2005 high school graduate (before the “One and Done” rule was put in place) with the professional career of a 2006 high school graduate (the first year that the “One and Done” rule was imposed).  The 2005 high school graduate went straight from high school to the NBA.  The 2006 high school graduate played one year of college basketball before starting his NBA career.  As revealed through data and included in my visualization, the 2005 graduate enjoyed more playing time, more success (as evidenced by All-Star game appearances) and earned more money through the course of his career than the 2006 graduate.  In class, we were instructed to draw pictures to show a problem vs. using words.  This helped greatly as I was able to take drafts and begin formulating that into my own visual.

My problem for this project is a “when” problem so I decided to use a timeline format to portray my issue. One of the suggestions I was given after preparing my first version was to be more deliberate in showing the passage of time.   My original design began with high school graduation (2005 for one player and 2006 for the other), and ended at the conclusion of their NBA careers.   In my original design I had each athlete’s graduation year on the tassel of his graduation cap, and retirement showing figures without basketballs in their hands (one holding up trophies and the other reclining on a lounge chair.  I included arrows to direct the audience from left (high school graduation) to right (retirement), and I assumed that with having the arrows the timeline would be obvious.  However, my classmates did not pick up on the timeline as quickly as I expected.  In my final version, I made the timeline concept clearer in the visual by adding podiums for the beginning and ending figures.  I added “Mr. B-ball 2005 High School Phenom” and “Mr. B-ball 2006 High School Phenom” to the podiums at the beginning, and trophies and a resting basketball to the podiums end of the timeline to show the conclusion of the playing career.  

Another change made to this version is the addition of text in the arrow of the player who was made to wait a year.  In my original version the text of the player made to wait a year (in the green arrow) was a fairly general point that did not add a lot of impact to my design.  However, in my final version the green arrow not only sounds like a dialogue from the stick figure above, but is more data driven making my points stronger.  

One change I thought about making, (however decided against) was changing the words inside the text to be visuals instead. However, for this project I viewed my audience as my classmates who for the most part did not have much familiarity with the NBA “One and Done” rule or were not basketball fans. I thought it was best keeping words because they would serve as a simple way to clarify my timeline.  If my intended audience for this visual had been basketball fans then I might have used visuals instead of text on the inside of the arrows.