Abstract

Understanding and consuming public budget data is a key issue, helping citizens in gaining insight into their democratic and political systems. The goal of this work is to present Waffster, a user-friendly representation supporting the understanding of such data. The proposed representation enables several tasks such as data discovering, searching, presenting, identifying and comparing, where targets are budget headings and their hierarchical relations. The contributions of this design study, which was carried out in close collaboration with Le Devoir, a Canadian newspaper, are: a thorough survey of online public budget visualizations, a novel hierarchical design based on waffle charts, a controlled user study to compare it to a tree-map based layout, and a case study conducted with Le Devoir during the Fall 2018 provincial election campaign in Quebec.

Keywords: Public budget, data visualization, design study.

Survey of Public Data Visualizations

A corpus of 39 budget data visualizations from mass media and public institutions was gathered. This corpus was analyzed along two dimensions: layout and tasks.

Controlled Experiment

A controlled experiment was performed to compare Waffster to a tree-map based on two aspects: data understanding and user experience.

Case Study

During 2018 Quebec provincial election, Le Devoir used Waffster to illustrate the impacts of financial frameworks of each political party on the actual provincial budget.

Source Code

Waffster was implemented as a web-application using TypeScript and d3.js. Waffster is open source and uses GPLv3 license.

Team

• 
  Antoine Béland
  Polytechnique Montreal
• 
  Florent Daudens
  Le Devoir
• 
  Thomas Hurtut
  Polytechnique Montreal