41–50 of 53 posts
So basically since 1976, the US is only on the positive side of the budget for 4 years (1998-2001). For all other (34) years, there has been a deficit. Yicks. If the US was a person, that person would be considered a financial disaster.
Why does it resort and regrow all the blocks when you switch between years or other settings? If the same blocks simply grew or shrunk, it would be a lot easier to follow the difference. Actually, it sometimes simply converts blocks into others - switching between 2012 and 2013, the "Justice" block morphs into the "National Infrastructure Bank" block. Very confusing.
Why does it resort and regrow all the blocks when you switch between years or other settings? If the same blocks simply grew or shrunk, it would be a lot easier to follow the difference. Actually, it sometimes simply converts blocks into others - switching between 2012 and 2013, the "Justice" block morphs into the "National Infrastructure Bank" block. Very confusing.
I came here to say the same thing. Having one section morph into another is unnecessarily confusing, and mostly masks the entire point. Also, it would be nice to slice this data across time as well, by clicking on a particular box and viewing a plot below the main visualization.
This is not a very good visualization. It makes it impossible to compare values in any meaningful sense - either in a relative growth, or the size of the budget as a whole. The animation serves no purpose, other than to make the user wait a few seconds between switching years.
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This visualization, while technically impressive, could use a little work.
Comparing values is difficult because I can't see the relative growth between the boxes from year to year, or size of the budget as a whole. I don't quite see how the animation benefits the user, so you may want to scrap it for some sort of differential comparison. I also don't like the delay when I change from year to year. That could be optimized or reduced through the reduction of the animation time.
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Yeah, I know it's kind of snarky of me to correct your entire comment here, but I think our community (yeah I know I haven't had my account here long) is overly focused on criticizing. While all the content of your comment was awesome, it could have been stated in a more polite manner.
I'm not sure how to fix the attitude that crops up in developer communities, all I can think to do is point it out when people may be coming off in way they don't mean to. Which is probably the root cause for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957
So basically since 1976, the US is only on the positive side of the budget for 4 years (1998-2001). For all other (34) years, there has been a deficit. Yicks. If the US was a person, that person would be considered a financial disaster.
The thing that makes this visualization different than other visualizations is that you can see the individual components of what makes up the large departments. Just double click on any of the boxes. If you single click on any box, you can see how that box changed over time.
So, for example, you can see that in 2012 that 2.89% of the budget went to education, but if you double click, you can see that only 13.73% of that went to elementary and secondary education.
You can also single click anywhere and see a graph of how things have changed over time. So you can see that in 2009 there was a huge spike in elementary and secondary education, and you can go to 2009 to further investigate, and find there was a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" in 2009 that sent $14 billion to education, and then went away.
As many have noted, this doesn't do a good job at comparing different departments to each other over time. This isn't a surprise, since a treemap is the completely wrong format to be able to do that. However, it is a very good format for exploring what agencies, bureaus and line items make up the large departments, which is data I've never seen anywhere else before, and why I built this visualization.
This is not a very good visualization. It makes it impossible to compare values in any meaningful sense - either in a relative growth, or the size of the budget as a whole. The animation serves no purpose, other than to make the user wait a few seconds between switching years.
I took a stab at rewriting your comment so that it still got the point across but lost some of the tone that I felt was overly rude. --------- This visualization, while technically impressive, could use a little work. Comparing values is difficult because I can't see the relative growth between the boxes from year to year, or size of the budget as a whole. I don't quite see how the animation benefits the user, so you…
The color profile on this chart makes it really hard to process... http://grab.by/q7ja It may be the text also and the choice of shapes.