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The sidebar provides a basic visual interface for filtering data shown on the map. There, users can change the visibility of the two data set layers, and view certain subsets of population and rainfall data. In essence, this is a visual way of querying the data, which improves upon previously existing software that requires the user to input SQL queries.
The motivation for the sliders came from our initial user interviews conducted before beginning the design process. During paper prototyping, we formulated our design decisions for the layout of the sidebar.
Our final design incorporated many of the suggestions made in the heuristic evaluations. The most "catastrophic" problems that we fixed are described below:
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