The last few evaluations went pretty well, most participants were able to grasp the meaning of all visualisations by themselves and offered valuable insights and further suggestions. Their comments led to some minor (mostly clarity related) tweaks and deciding on the right symbols to use.
General team overview
The most obvious change is the layout of the differences between both teams in some statistic. The total difference is split up in different components. Gold is split into inventory gold and spent gold whereas damage is split into physical, magic and true damage. The sum of these differences in the components is displayed below a line, similar to performing a summation in primary school. Differences are now also coloured according to the favoured team for some additional clarity.
Some of you might notice that damage taken is not included in the prototype anymore. The reason for this is that I actually don’t have the data to display this. Conveniently, removing this freed some space for the other visualisations.
The vulnerability visualisation is still the hardest one to grasp for participants since the statistic isn’t used in the official game. It’s actually a combination of different statistics in the game according to some made-up formula to combine them into one single, fictional vulnerability statistic. Some additional background text is added to make the ranking more obvious and to explain the presence of the symbols next to the champion portraits. The symbols now have a uniform style and are kept as simple as possible. They are recognizable by most participants, although the three little stars, representing the summoner spells, can sometimes still lead to confusion.
Role specific comparison
When selecting a role, plenty of participants justly stated that they would like to see which players or champions were being compared. This information is implicitly available in the video stream, but you’d already have to know which players play which role or the role order of the displayed champions. To that end, the champion portraits are now displayed in the header upon selecting a role as a quality of life improvement.
The symbols in the gold sources visualisation have also been polished. The base gold was often overlooked and therefore, it is now combined with the miscellaneous gold from before. Spectators can now clearly see that gold generation forms the bulk of a player’s gold and can compare this to the gold that’s actually earned on the map. A possible disadvantage could be the domination of this bar’s height in the bar chart, resulting in having a harder time to estimate or compare the other values.
After combining the gold difference and sources visualisations, there was plenty of space left in the role specific comparison view. The gold sources visualisation actually has a great analogy in the damage statistic. Damage can also be split up in different components, so it made sense to extend the similarity to this statistic and include it here. Now spectators can check the damage composition of a single player whereas before they could only see the differences along the different components for the whole team.
Evaluation
Almost all expert evaluations are over now and soon after I’ll be posting the prototype on Reddit for validation. It may be this leads to some (minor) changes prior to implementing the prototype. Really looking forward to see how the community will judge my efforts!