Technical Troubles: Tired Trip-ups of Torture.

So after a long night of working, the solution to the loading problem had come to me as I thinking of editing the previous entry which is probably rife with typos, misspoken statements, and frustration. Talking to my partner Ed Meyer this morning pointed out a major flaw in my attempts to get the 24 hour time line working: the auto-formatting done by the Google Document spreadsheet.

For those who wish to save themselves the trouble of reading the messy entry from this morning, Ed and I are on task to make a Google Gadget which takes the Bio Heat Map Google Visualization and uses it to display a comparative map of energy usage across different areas in a competition (whether it be dorm vs. dorm or floor vs. floor right now is arbitrary). With the troubles of learning a both a new visualization style and how to make Google Gadgets I was struggling to get an understanding of how to make it take in a spreadsheet, but Ed was able to do so well.



(The working basic Bio Heat Map)

In order to help illustrate our point I was trying to construct a table of data to show it in a more applicable form (with the floors and a larger time span to display) but was having issues loading. The frustration of the night originated from two major points, the Google Gadget checker’s outdated information and the constant bother from Google about the document loading timing out with no explanation of why.


(Malfunction: "If your times aren't clear we time out")

After finding out that my attempts at making the code more “international” was a deprecated code, I moved on to the loading issue but could find no relief. Ed pointed out to me this morning that the issue occurred probably because of formatting from the spreadsheet. I had thought about this for a moment, I imported a spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel which contained values of time and values for the energy usage, but what I hadn’t considered was the number formatting. Somewhere along this journey from document to document, offline to online, the number formatting for times changed from plain text to some kind of coordinate format. After switching it out the gadget was successful.


(Behold! It displays, but is a bit disorienting)

If anything this solution bring about the definite need be clear about what formatting needs to be used for the future. If this Bio Heat Map is going to be tied into the WattDepot system to allow people to see an active chart of the last 24 hours of a day versus another group, then keeping the values and the formatting clear and in plain text is something we have to watch over.

Once getting the gadget to work though my concern shifts back to the issue of color. Using colors is a significant ability but also the one with the most usability issues. To ensure that this makes sense I believe we’ll have to work on finding ways to add a legend and restrict ourselves to the proper coloring polls. To put it simply observe how the gadget looks without any color.

(Can you tell the difference between medium green and medium red?)

With the default color selection (red to green while passing through black) the colors are indistinguishable from each other, leading to a misgiving representation of high and low. In order for this to work I would think we need to pick colors that go from dark to light and be clear about which is good and what is bad. Failure to do so might make this application more questionable than it is useful.

At this point, my maybe concern tends to be about how to make this usable or if it would be worth using at all for our purposes. At this point it looks like this visualization would need a lot of work to make it more feasible on a large scale (Even at 3 floors for 24 hours finding a particular high or low point is a troublesome task), with things like padding, or borders, or at least a key of what the max color is. For now though we have a grounded gadget and though it is not something I would want to put my name on, I can say at least we are moving past all these troublesome trip-ups.