For this week, I’ve chosen to analyze the Caribbean Cholera Map. Cholera is an infection that causes diarrhea and severe dehydration, which could lead to death if untreated. The website displays instances of Cholera outbreak, hurricanes, tropical storms, and news articles all in one map. You could see it in map form, or in timeline form. The website is simple, with a simple user interface for most readers to understand. Unfortunately that is the only positive design choice for this website,, as it is riddled with series of bad design choices for using a map as a type of data visualization to creatively show audiences the cholera outbreak in the Caribbean.
The problem starts from the moment you enter the website. It starts out with the map that is too zoomed out from the Caribbean, that the markers are overlapping. This standard setup means that Cholera outbreak, which is arguably the most important aspect of the map, is hidden behind under less insignificant markers. Which leads to me the next flaw: we need more information. Yes, it is great to have a simple UI but you also need to have ways of displaying information if and when the audience chooses to. In this website, no matter how much you explore, it is virtually impossible to find what cholera is, why Havana is significant, or why they also chose to put in hurricanes, tropical storms, and news articles onto the map. In that sense, this map is subjective in that the the assumption is made that the audience already knows the answers I have posed in the previous sentence. In addition, the map does not display all news articles and cholera outbreaks, so the authors of the website are choosing which ones were the most significant. By choosing limited data from plentiful data through the author’s point of view, the website is very subjective. Thus, the point of view of this article must be those who currently live in the Caribbean, who already knows the significance of Cholera and Havana in that region.
By navigating the frustrating UI and confusing elements, the map reveals a great deal of information about exactly where cholera exactly happened, and at what time point. With the combination of timeline and a map, the user can choose a time they would like, and find out the locations of the outbreak, and receive more information by clicking on the markers. The map on the other hand fails to describe which part of Caribbean had the worst impact, and its intensity. Therefore, I imagine an alternate map that is more intuitive, where the user can display all cholera outbreak, hurricanes, tropical storm, and news article, regardless of time, and a check mark to see only one or few of the 4 markers. The time can then be flexibly restricted depending on what time interval the user chooses to. Then, like an earthquake magnitude map, this map could reveal the intensity of the earthquake by having more affected area (i.e. more deaths in a certain time period) have stronger color or a circle with a wider radius that indicates the intensity of the outbreak.