The website I am critiquing is the University dataset group's dataset. This dataset includes information about 285 universities with information about the location, the number of applicants, acceptance rate and number of applicants, and other numerical and categorical data
The main questions were: "Which universities are the most/least competitive," and "Is there a relationship between acceptance rate and school location, and are number of applicants and students correlated with acceptance rate?"
The first visualization displays the acceptance rate for up to the 50 most exclusive schools. There are two sets of interactions: a set of buttons that allows different levels of sorting the data in the bar graphs, and a slider that allows you to change the number of schools you want displayed. The list of schools updates to the left of the bar charts to show the bar that corresponds to each school. Furthermore, hovering over a bar shows a tooltip that gives more information about the school, including acceptance rate, location, etc.
The second visualization a lot of information--namely, a US map, and a coloring for each state. The coloring of the state represents the average acceptance rate for the schools in that state. All the states for which there is data (and therefore a color), there is also a pair of bars that show the average number of applicants and average number of students in the state. Hovering over a bar shows a tooltip giving the name of the state and also gives the value for the corresponding bar.
For the first visualization, I find the bar chart visualization to be a very simple way of answering the question of the most / least competitive universities.
The things that could be improved to make the answer more clear are to actually show the least competitive colleges, and not just the top 50 most competitive colleges. Currently, you can only see the top 50 colleges by acceptance rate, and you can see the least competitive of those, but you cannot see the "bottom" 50 colleges, which more accurately answer the question of which universities are least competitive.
The second visualization presents another dimension to the data (albeit, on a state-wide level) by using spatial data. The coloring allows the user to see the relationship (or lack thereof) between geography and acceptance rate.
The second visualization could perhaps be improved with less cluttering. It is a bit hard to navigate the bars for schools in the northeast. There is also no indication that there is an effect when I click on a state. It could be good if there were a hover effect to tell me that the state is interactable.
I would like to ask basically what I said above--we have the top 50 schools in their visualization 1, but I would like to look at the bottom 50 schools of the 250 or so schools, not the "bottom" schools of the top 50 schools. That is all.