CSC 477 Assignment 4 Peer Review

In this assignment, you will review the Assignment 4 submissions of two of your peers, and you will receive feedback from two of your peers.

The goals of this assignment are threefold:

1. To use a systematic approach to provide constructive feedback to your peers about their interactive visualizations.
2. To gain insights into others’ ideas given the same constraints as you, and to reflect on your own work.
3. To receive and reflect on constructive feedback about your own work.

• Task
• Deliverable
• Grading
• Acknowledgement

Task

There are two parts to this assignment.

First, you need to make your submission available for peer review. Find the Canvas Discussion entitled “A4 Peer Review Thumbnails” and make a post with the following information:

• A screenshot of your visualization.
• A link to your Observable notebook. Make sure it is publicly viewable. Test this out by navigating to the notebook in a private browser window.
• 1–2 sentences describing your visualization. It should include the topic of your visualization and the interactions you implemented.

Second, you will be assigned two peer submissions to review. You’ll receive these review assignments by email, so keep an eye out for that. Once you receive your review assignments, find them in Canvas, and consider them critically, answering the questions below.

Because you will all be reviewing public Observable notebooks, these reviews will be single-anonymous. You will know whose submissions you’re reviewing, but they will receive your feedback anonymously.

Write your review constructively and respectfully. Not adhering to this will result in a zero for this assignment.

Consider the following questions when writing your review:

• Does the visualization have a clear purpose? Its purpose may be to inform, to explain through exploration, to persuade, to entertain, or something else.
• Does the visualization use expressive and effective visual encodings?
• Does the visualization use effective interaction idioms? Does the visualization provide affordances for its interactions?
• Is the visualization cluttered or confusing? Is it easy to read and understand?
• Does the visualization make appropriate use of scales, axes, titles, labels, legends and color schemes?
• Does the visualization make clear what data is being visualized and how it was transformed, e.g., though parenthetical remarks in labels or tooltips?

Deliverable

Submit your reviews as two PDFs in Canvas. Each PDF should contain answers to each of the questions above, and any other comments you have about the visualization. Please include the questions in your PDF, and then provide your answers below each question.

Name your PDFs as follows: AuthorName1.pdf and AuthorName2.pdf, where AuthorName1 and AuthorName2 are the names of the authors of the submissions you are reviewing. Do not include your own name in the PDF.

I suggest that you focus each of your answers in your review around one or more of the following phrases:

• “I like…” (for positive feedback; also mention why you like what you like)
• “I suggest…” (for constructive feedback; this should tell you that it’s not enough to say you don’t like something: you need to suggest a way to improve it)
• “What if…” (for suggestions that are more open-ended, potentially half-baked ideas for extending the visualization)

You may also say:

• “I wonder…” (for points of confusion you have about the visualization)

These are obviously not the only types of feedback you may have, but centering around these sentiments should help keep our reviews constructive.

Grading

You will receive a grade based on the following criteria, in increasing order of importance.

• Did you provide an on-time submission for others to review?
• Did you provide a complete response to each of the review questions?
• Does your review identify both strengths and weaknesses of the visualization, grounded in what we’ve learned thus far about effective visualization?
• Where weaknesses were identified, were sound suggestions for improvement provided?

For full credit, both your reviews should include at least one statement in each of the “I like…”, “I suggest…”, and “What if…” categories.

Finally, here is another reminder that inappropriate or disrespectful feedback will automatically result in a zero for this assignment.

Acknowledgement

This assignment was adapted from a similar assignment in CSE 442 at the University of Washington, taught by Jeffrey Heer.

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