3. Visual Design

Based on what we have learned during the design sessions, we implemented the techniques to our project data and established our visual design (https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lONNIog=/).

The visual design is composed of three phases, namely diverge, emerge, and converge phases.

Figure 1: Overview of Visual Design

In the diverge phase, we combined two or three features to generate the following sketches. In the emerge phase, we clustered some sketches from the last stage in order to generate new ideas. In the converge phase, some integrated, more informative, and creative plots were generated combining the elements from the second stage.

In the following parts, we will dive a bit deeper into our design.

According to our research question, we created our initial sketches in the initial stage. For example, concerning the research question--which companies are the major players in the market, a tree diagram was generated showing the number of games that manufacturers/ publishers have created. Furthermore, the number of manufacturers and publishers in each country around the world were presented in Figure 3. To some extent, these two radar plots can be used to assess the prosperity of the mobile game industry.

Figure 2: Tree Diagram of Game Numbers for Publishers/ Manufacturers

Figure 3: Number of Manufacturers and Publishers Wordwide.

In addition, to get an overview of the market share of mobile games in each region, the following sketches were created.

Figure 4: Total IOS Income in Each Region

Figure 5: Total IOS Downloads for Each Region

Figures 4 and 5 illustrated the general IOS income and downloads in each region, showing the current market status. In these two graphs, we can have a straightforward sense of how the income and downloads of mobile games differ across the world. In addition, it offers a great degree of flexibility, that we can converge numerous dimensions into this sketch, for instance, game type and IP information.

To further explore the potential of each market, a more detailed sketch of income and downloads generated by each game was drafted in Figure 6, with each dot representing a certain game in each region.

Figure 5: IOS Income and Downloads of Each Game in Each Region

As for the IP-related research question, the proportion of game types with IPs is shown in the pie chart below.

Figure 6: Proportion of Game Type for Those with IPs

With the exploration of the sketches in the first stage, we had a general understanding of our dataset. Further on, in order to explore the business relationships among companies within the industry, we first combined the tree diagrams on manufacturers and publishers. Ideally, we expect to draw a network graph to demonstrate their relationships. For illustration purposes, Figure 7 .1 about the initial concept of the network graph is shown below.

Figure 7: Business Status and Relationships for Publishers or Manufacturers

Moreover, we emerged the sketches in Figure 2 and Figure 5 to reveal the relations between the game publishers and their mobile game allocations. Figure 7.2 is aimed to answer the question that whether a game publisher's business strongly depends on one popular game. In our vision, we hope we could achieve the final visualization that if you click a certain manufacturer or publishers in Figure 7.1, a new diagram shown as in Figure 7.2 will pop up presenting its mobile game allocation with both download and income information. In this way, we could bring both interaction and information to our visualization.

What's more, by combining the IP information and game type composition, we can further explore the game type allocation and the proportion of games with IPs in the following graph.

Figure 8: Game Type Allocation and Proportion of Game with IPs For Each Publisher

In general, we think this visual design is a very helpful way for us to further understand our data, and have an original idea of what our final visualization could be.

More progress will be coming soon...