A few days ago, the viz of the day on 11/22/2016 shows the bike usage in Philadelphia. Very nicely designed with a combination of route map, top 10 routes per bike station and daily usage heat maps.

The little things I would like to tweak are as follows. The main idea here is to create consistency across different views, so that we can compare things under the equal conditions or relate one view with another easily.

1. Keeping the map view consistent

The map view may vary greatly when clicking on the top 10 route bars.
The single dot means it is a round trip where starting and ending stations are the same one.
To fix this, go to desktop menu: Map > Map Options. Just change the map option from "Automatic" to either "Metric" or "U.S.". The other map options don't seem very useful in this viz. They can be turned off or left alone.
Now we can set the map view to be a fixed city map, where we can see the relative location of the routes.

2.Keeping the line size consistent

The route line width is sized according to the usage. The size range changes according to the starting bike station. Personally I feel that using a global size range will allow us to compare the bike usage between different routes regardless of starting points.

This is how I chose to use a fixed size range:
There are a few usage numbers larger than 1000. So the largest size is for usage >=1000
3.Keeping the color palette consistent

This is an effort to create a common palette between the top 10 routes bar chart and route map. This allows us to easily identify the same route across the two charts. Note that the data ranges are different in these two charts. To force a common palette, we need to use a fixed lower bound. The upper bound is always the same.


Other tweaks include:

4.Showing dots at both starting and ending bike stations

It's a line chart option to add a dot at a data point.
5.Highlighting routes using action filter

This allows us to view the top 10 routes quickly by hovering mouse over the bar chart.

This concludes the tweaks of this viz. It's intended to share some of my design ideas. See you next time.

The tweaked version can be accessed from here.