Pulse: Toward a Smart Campus by Communicating Real-time Wi-Fi Access Data

To enhance the mobility and convenience of the campus community, we designed and implemented the Pulse system, a visual interface for communicating the crowd information to the lay public including campus members and visitors. This is a challenging task which requires analyzing and reconciling the demands and interests for data as well as visual design among diverse target audiences. Through an iterative design progress, we study and address the diverse preferences of the lay audiences, whereby design rationales are distilled. The final prototype combines a set of techniques such as chart junk and redundancy encoding. Initial feedback from a wide audience confirms the benefits and attractiveness of the system.