By: Veronica Perkins

Sankey is a tool that can be used to create interactive visualizations in a way that helps your audience follow. Upon exploring Sankey for over ten minutes, I was so intrigued. However, it can be a little intimidating.

Now let’s discuss the usage in our energy system…

Right upon entry of this visualization, it takes you to the home screen pictured above. Within this home screen, you can see how at the top, it lists several other tabs that can move you to another data set. For example:

When I clicked on the “Understanding Efficiency” tab, it brought me to this page. On this page, it briefly explains the point of efficiency and what it does, while on the side it has two interactive buttons. These interactive buttons are just one great example out of the whole project. They allow the audience to click on them and explore. By having interactive features throughout your project, it allows for the audience to read, comprehend, and travel through each data set at their own pace.

Overall, I really enjoyed how interactive this project was. It was very well organized and left the reader/audience to go through each data set at their own pace. However, sometimes I feel like an entire website can feel like a bit of overkill when it comes to project like these. I feel as though there are other ways to keep your audience entertained while presenting them with data set; without having to do all of this. To be less harsh, I believe that sometimes an entire website can be a bit much and sometimes the audience can get bored or not want to participate anymore. Also, the Sankey graphs themselves can be very overwhelming to the audience and may even leave them feeling lost. Instead, providing simpler graphs with a lot of color variations and details, may be easier for both the creator and the audience.