What can changes in the percentage of insured people overtime at the country, state, and city levels tell us about the adoption of ACA and Medicaid in the U.S.?

O U T C O M E

'Walkthrough' Prototype

We presented a demo of our prototype that highlights our important discoveries. Our data visualization has a form of a website, that guides viewers according to the narrative structure that consisted of a series of questions, providing information interactively. 

U N V E I L I N G M E A N I N G S

Developing Research Question

Finding connections

To forster research question, we started by jotting down data we wanted to use for our research on health insurance status from the US to Pittsburgh. Then, we wrote questions that we have derived from data sets. While writing down rough ideas, we discussed which data is accessible and which data sets can be related to each other.

Policies, and Policy makers

While investigating data, we began to wonder which factor would effect for people to get insured, and who can help people get health insurance. We came up with the Obamacare. We thought it would be great if we could compare the uninsured rate before and after the act, showing the trend of the uninsured rate. 

What changes did the enactment of ACA in 2010 bring to the percentage of insured people?

Is this drop because of Medicaid expansion in 2014?

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What changes did the Medicaid expansion in 2014 bring to the percentage of insured people?

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V I S U A L I Z I N G D A T A

Structuring experience

Scales, Range, Buckets

We made decisions on how to organize each data using different structures.

Narrative and Indexical Structure

To show our findings in a narrative structure, but still let viewers navigate data on their own, we combined indexical structure to our narratives.

Developing visual keys

Coordinate System

For the basic structure, we agreed on to use geographic coordinate system.

Shapes

Circles represented units in each level. At the nation level, each circle means a state, while at the state level, a city. Also, the sizes of circles represented the insurance rate, with minimum and maximum sizes to show enough changes over time/ across levels and stay in the grids.

Opacity

I suggested using different percentages of opacity of the fill color to communicate the points when each city adapted Medicaid Expansion.

Integrating into the screen

I created UI style - picked a color that is deep and serious while goes well with the 'health' theme. Then based on the wireframe, I created UI components in Figma considering status changes according to user interactions.

Micro interactions

After drawing screens, I added effects to visually show transitions as viewers proceed investigating.

R E F L E C T I O N S

Storytelling in data visualization engage people to the experience

Combining narrative structure enabled us to introduce audience to the experience more easily than explaining it in written text. To do so, we carefully formed guiding questions, and tried many different forms of visualization.

Mapping data into different range for visualization requires a lot of considerations.

As we represented the insurance rate with circle size, visibility of the change of the sizes was crucial. To make sure that each circle fit into grid showing notable changes, we converted actual numbers into pixel numbers of circle sizes.