Looking for ideas on visualizing activity over time
I'm building a site for keeping track of my progress towards goals/resolutions during the year. Beginning of the year I would set some resolutions and then every week record whether I worked towards it or not and a note. Note is either what I did, or what prevented me from doing it.
My inspiration is GitHub's activity map. I like the idea having an 'at a glance' view of how the year is going. My first attempt was to go vertical. It would be mobile friendly, but I couldn't find a good way to annotate which column belongs to which resolution.
Second attempt was to go horizontal and use lines (or spacing?) to visually group resolution and progress together. Unfortunately then I can't think of way to add time annotations. Without those it's harder to see things like "in march I was terrible about walks, I wonder what happened?"
I'm looking for ideas on other ways I may present this information. Suggestions on how to make this look good are also welcome.
6 Replies
I like the heatmap option a lot, and have used that for various things that I track. E.g.
In a different context I can also use ASCII, and so I use a fixed-width font and generate this:
oooh, I like the ASCII idea
a problem I haven't found a good solution for is that resolution text can be long and I can't fit it side by side with progress like you did
That's why I tried text on top, boxes on the bottom approach, but then I don't have a good way to put months on there
If there was an easy answer to this, people would already have found it!
I think you want to decide whether it's more important to see lots of data, or to be able to tell what day/week/month the data is from. If you don't need to see dates accurately, then you could use much smaller dots to squeeze either a whole year per line or say 3 months per line. That could work under longer text headings?
(I.e. a heatmap, but a slightly different shape and smaller squares.)
maybe split them up by quarter and stack vertically?
will try that and see how it looks
I’d like to see the result.