View the online visualization here.
Design Statement
The Data: For this project I compiled all the step counter data in the health app to make all the graphs. First, I exported all the data and organized it in excel. The file that it exported was very large and the data went all the way back to 2014, so I had to go through and filter out what I didn’t need. This may have been one of the hardest parts of the whole project because it took so much time. I decided that it would be interesting to see the total steps that I walked for this year and see what months I walked the most. The other data that I thought would be interesting was the flights of stairs that I walked up. I think that this doesn’t always means stairs, it also counts elevation like if you walk up and down hills a lot. This would be interesting to see how much it increases from living on the west coast with little to no hills to Pullman where there are lots of hills. The other data that I got to do this project was the total number of miles that I walked for the year. I thought that this might be interesting to see if it contradicts at all with the number of steps.
The Visualization: For the interactive charts I wanted to where it showed every day for the year, so I did a scatter plot of dots that got darker for the more steps that I walked on that day. I feel like this makes the individual days stand out from each other and you can see exactly the day where I did a lot of walking. For the static data, I decided to do one bar chart and two line type charts. For the flights of stairs climbed chart I shortened the list of months because they were all very similar in the height until the start of this semester when I moved back to Pullman and started climbing more stairs, and more hills. This shows just how much walking students do while on campus. For the miles walked per month chart I made the line get thicker for more miles walked. This makes the month stand out and I think it looks a little nicer that just a straight line.
Insights: Looking back over the data I learned a lot about myself that I hadn’t realized before. I realized that I did a lot more walking over the summer than I had expected. Most of the reason I think that I had so many steps was from working at my job over the summer. I worked at a concert venue that was very large and required you to walk a lot. Our small group of people had the job of delivering supplies to the different venues that sold food, beer, and wine. This made me have to walk and carry a lot of things. It was fun though because the venue was outside and listen to music all day. If I were to continue this project I don’t think that it would show much more than I have already shown. I think that it would just be more data to work with, but it would be interesting to see how much my walking goes back up once the weather starts to get nicer. I think that now looking back at this data it makes me want to walk even more. If you look at my data for steps by the day you can see certain days where I barely even walked. Yes, it’s cool that I walked over thirty miles in one day, but that was just one day. Even though the weather is cold, this makes me want to keep walking and push myself to be even healthier.