State Unemployment Rate Nowcasts
The goal: reimagine the visualisations for the State Unemployment Rate Nowcasts, or simply Nowcasts.
The Philadelphia Fed published the Nowcasts to estimate the unemployment rates of the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. My task, to use our latest design updates to bring the Nowcasts to the web with a new hub or landing page and update the data visualisation.
My Function
- Creative director
Design Team
- Designer
- Developer
Skills Applied
- Design management
- Editorial design
- Information design
- Product design
- UX/UI design
- Data visualisation
Using Our Larger Content Environment
Using the building blocks established by GDPplus, the Partisan Conflict Index, and the State Coincident and Leading Indices, I redesigned the Nowcasts using small multiples of line charts and factettes. Taken together these formed the “hero” image of the hub page. Additionally, I created a Microsoft Word template for the product owners to use in creating downloadable .pdfs for the public.
The Nowcasts incorporated a number of metrics, including historical unemployment data for the state and the nation, the number of unemployment insurance claims, and the current data from the Philadelphia Fed’s Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey (MBOS). A planned future upgrade for the Nowcasts would have included a table showing the relative impact of these metrics on the Nowcast value for the state in question.
Small multiples of line charts with fixed chart minimums and maximums allow users to quickly cross compare the values and trends of the three Third District states, which can vary significantly. In the background, I provided the national unemployment rate to place the state within the broader national context. These were all then made available for inclusion in a Microsoft Word template, which allows for publishing of a downloadable .pdf for the public.
Final Project Deliverables
- Three small multiple line charts
- New page/content hub template
- New Word/.pdf template