Visualising the Number of the Disorder of nervous system caused by West Nile virus across the US

Visual Design
#1

Hi, I’m a student at Swansea University trying to visualize data from Project Tycho (https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/US.430397002/). You can see my visualization below of a map showing the prevalence of the disease across the US.

Map
Map503×817 35 KB

Name of Tool: Infogram

Disease: Disorder of nervous system caused by West Nile virus

Year: 2002 - 2017

Visual Mappings

•Colors: The map uses red and green to indicate how many infections there have been for each state. The greener a state is the fewer infections there have been, the more red a state is means there have been more infections.
• State Name (Hidden unless you hover the mouse over)
• Amount of Infections (Hidden unless you hover the mouse over)
Data Preparation: Made a new CSV file from the dataset containing only the State Name and total amount of infections for each state.

My questions are:

How could I improve on this visualization?
Would it be better to have used different colours?

#2

Hi,

I think it is an interesting design with nice interactivity and I also believe you might have answered your own question there: the best way to check whether the design could be improved using a different colour map would be to try different ones of different types and see what happens.

ColorBrewer

[Colorgorical

These two tools should be able to help you experiment with colour.

Best of luck

Carlo