I really enjoyed working with Flourish because, at least from a user-interface perspective, it feels like a very approachable data visualization tool. The interface is clean, visually appealing, and okay-ish to navigate. I liked being able to change different aspects of the visualization without having to write code or build the graph from scratch. At the same time, one of the most frustrating parts of using Flourish was that many of the settings did not clearly explain what they would actually change in the final visualization. I often found myself changing a setting, looking at the graph, and then trying to figure out exactly what I had just altered.
My biggest problem was that getting the names into the particular order I wanted, which in Flourish was not as simple as it sounds. I wanted to arrange them by rank in 2001, and then put the names that weren’t present in the initial year in the order their first counts appeared. The tool gave me options for sorting the data, but I couldn’t change the order of the names, which, to me, affected other important parts of the visualization. Instead, I found that changing the sorting behavior could organize the names by a different variable or in a way that didn’t represent what I was trying to show.
I even tried going outside of Flourish and manually sorting the CSV file in Excel. My thinking was that if I could arrange the rows exactly how I wanted them before uploading the data, Flourish would simply follow that order. Unfortunately, that did not really solve the problem either. Sorting the spreadsheet changed the underlying arrangement of the data, but it did not necessarily translate into the visual ordering I wanted once the data was imported into Flourish.
I also wanted to set the different genders to different colors (blue for the males and pink for females), but the way I had the charts separated wouldn’t allow for that, so I opted for green instead. As for other little fine-tuning things, I changed how the names aligned with the rows, so they would be centered rather than offset.