Consider Quality

Refining Our Design and Simplifying Visuals

The feedback that we received from sharing our information design with others provided us with a clear path to improve our prototype. Although we initially tried to use a spectrum from blue to pink to show the overall level of a purchase, we found that this was too obscure. We decided instead to focus on showing the user a combination of two measures. Since we previously determined that if a product performs better than the average the daily cost was more important than if a product was local, we chose to use color to represent better than average or worse than average daily cost. This also solved our problem of a low daily cost not seeming rewarding (when, in fact, the lower the daily cost, the better). The user could learn that pink meant quality and blue did not. In addition to showing daily cost by color, we would provide the actual daily cost score. This was important since a $0.08 average was estimated. We determined we could use simple icons to show if a product was bought at a local retailer (and later if it achieved high retailer and manufacturer corporate responsibility. This system seemed to work nicely because we could also separate daily cost from whether a retailer is local when need be. The diagram below communicates this system to the user and shows how points would be gained from each purchase.

We then adapted this system to give the user feedback on his or her recent purchases. It was still important to show the user how spending feeds back into the local economy and ranks in daily cost, but this could be buried a little deeper into the splash page and brought up only when the user initiates it.