Designed a playful and engaging visualization of Netflix movie ratings in Flex.
Highlights
Tools: Adobe Flex, Inkscape
Methods: User Interview, Statistics, Pencil Sketching and Hifi Prototyping
Project Website
Prototypes
Instructor: Michael J. McQuaid
Course: SI649 – Information Visualization
Overview
My goal was to design a playful and engaging visualization of a complex data set. The Netflix movie ratings dataset was an ideal candidate, since it has multiple dimensions, and movie ratings inherently are fun and conversational. Moviegoers have unique taste. I like movies like “Memento”, while I didn’t enjoy popular hits like “Wall-E”. Being a movie buff, I wanted to create a fun information visualization for moviegoers. I started with the question – “Is it possible to visualize a user’s movie ratings to show their unique movie taste?”. I wanted to create an artifact that is unique to each moviegoer.
Process
To understand the artifacts and variables about movies and movie ratings, I interviewed a Netflix user and studied the Netflix ratings dataset that was released for the Netflix competition. The variables I wanted to codify were: a movie rating (1-5 stars), mean rating for the movie, and total number of ratings for the movie. I took a sample of users and their ratings from the Netflix dataset as an input for the visualization.
I did many pencil sketches to iterate through my ideas to represent a movie rating. Movie posters, I realized, are the most identifiable representation of a movie. My early sketches used a collage of movie posters to represent a user’s ratings. But I wanted to focus more on the rating and uniqueness of a rating.
In the next revision, I moved to a metaphorical representation of a rating, of a flower in a garden. This allowed me to concentrate on the ratings of a user and place it in the context of other ratings. After a few sketches and feedback from my classmates, I was confident that a flower garden representation would answer my question.
Final Design
I developed an interactive prototype using Adobe Flex, faithfully implementing my own design. In the future, I would like to continue working on this project so that one could fetch data from Netflix’s API for any user.