Buckets of Rain

It was a chill Saturday evening in Ann Arbor. I was driving on State Street with my friends. Suddenly there were bright blue and red lights flashing. The cops pulled me over to the side of the road, I didn't know why. The officer came over, with his hand over his pistol.

"Sir, you were driving at 42 mph, the speed limit is 30mph. Any particular reason?" , the officer asked me sternly.

I looked at the officer and said, "You see officer, I was actually thinking about my class project on Information Visualization and got lost in my thoughts."

Officer smirked and said - "You are the third person in this week to give the same excuse. Anyways, where are you heading now?"

"To find users who can evaluate my prototype. Do you know where I can find them?" I asked the officer.

"I never engaged in this kind of thing. But yes, I think it can be easily done... Just go down on Highway 61."

That was how I found (or didn't find) users to evaluate my interactive prototype.

The Netflix dataset was massive and this is not a data analysis class. So instead of being rigorous with my data, I randomly choose 100 users from the Netflix data as my sample users. Next I stored all the ratings by these users and stored into in a database. Next I calculated, user average rating, movie rating, number of ratings for a movie.

I started implementing the interactive prototype in Processing. But it was difficult to do layouts and event driven programming. I found it difficult to redraw only specific objects when some event, like mouse over a flower. So I switched to Actionscript (Thanks to Jim Laing for giving me a quick tutorial). I created the background using GIMP. The backend data is handled by PHP/MySQL

1. Each flower represents a movie
2. Height represents the rating given by user
3. Lean of the stem indicates the variance from the average rating for the movie
4. Distance of a flower base from other flower indicates
5. Flower sways on mouse over - although it lacks elegance and purpose
6. Movie title, user's rating and other information is shown on the mouse over

I believe in the infinite monkey theorem. It is not difficult to believe that a monkey can do anything I do, but slowly. In the same sprit I used a service called Mechanical Turk, to get feedback from users (who are basically monkeys posing as humans). For those unfamiliar with the service, it is a marketplace for getting simple taksks completed. For my tasks the instructions were simple: worker has to visit my page (having the viz), spend a few minutes and share their thoughts. I didn't say anything about the purpose or anything specific about the visualization.

I submitted only two tasks, so only two workers completed the task. One worker commented, "I don't actually understand the object of this page. I assume there should be more to it, but I wasn't really able to do anything on the site. It appears that each piece of 'grass' corresponds to a movie and the length depends on the rating the movie has received. I tried clicking on the 'grass' as well as all over the rest of the page and nothing happened. I tried to highlight and change my rating for some of the movies and was unable to do that either. I tried clicking and dragging to change the length, but was not successful. Overall, at this point, I don't understand the point of the page or what you should be able to do."

The other worker was clueless,"I suspect this to be a blog. I just read the little writings on the top right corner, that's all there is. When I just opened the page, I just stared at it. It reminded me of where I come from. there is a vast plain. In the evening, when the sun is setting, it looks exactly like that. It so tranquil. it brought me memories of home sweet home! I just loved it!"