I come from India, where most parents force their children to pursue technical degrees since they believe that is the only way they can earn a decent wage and live a good life. A similar trent is prevalent in a lot of other countries including the US. With my story I aim to convince students and in turn parents that they do not have to fall into the trap of STEM degrees just for the sake of money. They can very easily live a great life and earn enough money doing whatever they want to. My intention behind posting comparision charts was also to show that there is not a lot of difference in the salaries earned in technical and non technical jobs and that students should be confident in their skillset as they can earn as much or in some cases even more than their technical peers
I wanted to understand my final story board better from a technical, data viz and layman perspective. So I interviewed one from each category. I interviewed a student pursuing a technical masters program at Carnegie Mellon university in order to understand his perspective on how the website renders to a user and if I can make any changes in terms of presenting my blog. I then asked a data visualization expert in order to garner her perspective on how I can improve my charts. Finally, I asked a friend who did not have any technical knowledge in order to understand if she would enjoy reading it as an outsider and if the topic is interesting enough
| Interview prompts | Interviewer 1 (Technical Expert) | Interviewer 2 (Data Viz Expert) | Interviewer 3 (Regular User) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can you tell me what you think this is? | Kind of looks like a blog but it does not have a navigation bar and that makes it look more like a slideshow. It tells me about how I can become rich without possessing technical skills. I see some charts and graphs too talking about salaries | An article talking about how I can make money with only non technical skills. I also see some charts that are used to support the statements made overall | On the first look it feels like a pdf about how to have a viable non technical careers. As I scroll more, it feeels more like a medium blog with some picture graphs |
| Who do you think the intended audience is? | I think the audience is anyone who wants to have a lucrative career in a non STEM field. Since you seem to have a lot of college student info maybe its a little more geared towards students? | Probably college graduates choosing a major. They can plan out what courses to select based on the tree map you made and the salaray graphs you have. It can also be useful for those looking to make a career switch since they can see where the money is | My mom! Since I decided to take up a non STEM path, it was very difficult to convince my parents. Maybe I can use these statistics to convince her that I will still get a job! |
| Do you think the content keeps you nterested enough to follow through? | It does! Though I might not go through the whole thing since there is a lot of scrolling | Yeah. I found some of the interactive visualization pretty interesting and would enjoy looking through it and testing out potential career ideas | I would definitely click on it if I see it on a social media website since the title is catchy |
| Is there anything you find surprising or confusing? | In the graph showing salary comparisions I was surprised about how some places show non technical roles earning significantly more salaries. Also why is there data and analytics separate shouldnt it fall under tech? | The slide about college majors shows that each sub major has the exact same distribution. If thats not true then it could be a little misleading | I dont find anything confusing as such but It was surprising to see the range of non technical jobs avaible based on skillset in the box graph page |
| Do you have any recommendations for change or anything you would do differently? | Add the navigation bar so it would be easy to scroll through. Some of the background images are not high definition and that ruins the flow a little. There is a lot to scroll. Maybe find a way to reduce overall scrolling or show reader how much is left? | Maybe consider adding more whitespaces sinces the website currently looks more like a slideshow than an actual website. You should also define what you mean by non technical so people would not be confused as to what it means. | The pie graph was not intuitive enough to know that you could click on each section. You should mention that. Also maybe add resources to career counselors or college lists in the call to action so people would have a better idea on next steps |
I really liked the idea of having a navigation bar as suggested by one of the interviewees and implemented the same in my story board. I also took into considereration that some of the graphs like the pie chart may not be as intuitive to a user without prior visualization knowledge. For now I simply added "Click to view" in the subtitle but i would look into ways to make it more obvious to users. I also got a common feedback about my website appearing a little slideshowy in nature and I wish to ponder upon it a little more and see what direction I want to take in terms of visuals. Overall my interviewees had a positive opinion about the whole idea and that makes me confident that I am moving in the right direction.
I like the third interviewees idea of adding links and definite next steps to my call of action and plan to implement the same to my final presentation. During the class critique a peer suggested having different call of actions for different audiences and I think adding that to my final presentation would definitely increase inpact. I would also be adding detailed descriptions which are currently just placeholders in my webpage and finally I want to try and make my webpages appear more like a webpage and not a slideshow so I will think about how I can best incorporate whitespace to do the same