Information Graphic, Part 4: Final Design

     Our team has settled on a finalized design for out infographic, which we hope addresses the major concerns raised in class. It is designed to appeal to an audience of WPI students majoring in biology with limited computer science (CS) experience. Its purpose is to convince these students that is worthwhile to take some CS-related classes, particularly CS 1104 (the introductory CS course for non-majors, which is taught using Python) and BCB 100X (a bioinformatics course). This final version of the graphic appears as follows:



These are the key issues we believe this version of the graphic addresses:

Issue #1: The focus seemed to be promoting the bioinformatics major instead of encouraging biology students to get computer science experience.
     The topic of the graphic has been refocused back away from bioinformatics and towards a broader look at applications of computer science. We have updated both the wording and statistics used throughout our graphic to reflect this.

Issue #2: Our graphic appealed to a distinctly male audience, both aesthetically and with its references to money.
     Our main method of addressing this was adding more icons of people, and made sure to include several that were female. This helped to make it less gender-specific while humanizing the graphic and adding visual interest to our statistics and information blurbs. While we did not remove the money statistic, we added more data elsewhere and scaled the money icon down so it seems less significant. Unfortunately, the actual statistics we added were not available to us in the time frame of this assignment, so we used fabricated estimates.

Issue #3: Our icons were not adequately labeled to be easily understood by people not already familiar with their topics.
     In our final draft the icons are now all labeled, and they are accompanied by text blurbs that help to elaborate on what they mean. We also repositioned them onto the yellow strand to reduce overall clutter and help them feel cohesively linked to the rest of the graphic.

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