Introduction
Animal Care Center of NYC is the city’s shelter for homeless animals. Accepting almost any animal, domestic or wild, whether completely healthy or on its deathbed, the ACC takes in close to 30,000 animals each year. Despite the number of unique and exotic animals passing through, the majority of animals in the shelter population, at any given time, are cats and dogs.
With such an overwhelming number of animals to care for, it can be difficult for the Animal Care Center as a non-profit organization as well as its individual employees to grasp the scale and track trends in their population. These visualizations are intended to help Animal Care Center employees to be able to see, comprehend and communicate the numbers that reflect their efforts to end animal homelessness in New York City.
Materials
After receiving no response to requests made directly to the ACC and discovering an extensive record created by a Behavior Team employee no longer existed, data was taken from publically available monthly Asilomar Reports on the Animal Care Center of NYC website.
Data was cleaned using OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel.
Graphs were created in Tableau Public.
Analysis
The Animal Care Center has increased its efforts in community outreach and education in attempts to bring the number of cats and dogs into the shelter to manageable levels. This includes scheduling appointments for owners surrendering their pet as well as Trap, Neuter, Release programs and educating the public regarding when it is appropriate to bring stray cats and kittens into the shelter. This is reflected in the decline in the number of the animals the Animal Care Center is intaking each year.
The decline in intake numbers over the three year period is visualized in a line graph, as it is easy for the user to register the small shift in 2015 and 2016 followed by the sharp reduction in 2017. The numbers are divided by animal so the user can see the difference in decline between cats and dogs. Cats being the brighter, due to the change in numbers being more significant and more important to the presentation of the entire dataset. The intake number graph is paired with numbers of Humane Euthanasia and Adoptions occurring at the shelter. This is to illustrate that the decline in intake is not happening in a void. Euthanasia rates, especially of cats, are going down and the number of adoptions, which is fairly steady over the three years, is not the cause.
This bar graph which visualizes the five outcomes all animals must fall under when leaving the shelter. While this is most useful for someone unfamiliar with the outcomes (adoption, transfer to a New Hope Partner, humane euthanasia, returned to their owner or death while in/escape from the shelter) user feedback from employees found they did appreciate the way this once again visualized the decline in the cat population as well as the differences between the cat and dog outcome numbers.
While the Animal Care Center of NYC does its best to downplay the number of animals humanely euthanized in its shelters, I did the opposite with this graph. The decline in cats euthanized is impressive and I think an ACC team member can be proud of what they’ve accomplished and a member of the public can appreciate the ongoing effort to reduce those numbers.
This stacked bar graph visualizes how much of the total percentage of each outcome over the three year period has been outgoing cats or outgoing dogs. While the use the percent of total calculation on the stacked bar graph does seem to conflate the extremely high number of animals going to New Hope Rescues and the very few died/lost in/from the shelter when presented side by side or right after another the users remembered the stark difference in number.
Looking at the graph, there are a few clear pieces of information. Dogs are much more likely to be returned to their owner while cats account for almost all the dead and lost animals in the shelter. Adoption rates are steady and almost evenly split throughout the year. Cats are a higher percentage of New Hope rescues in the summer months and drop in the winter. Cats account for the majority of humanely euthanized animals between July and October. The trends displayed in this bar graph show a strong indication that the time of year has an impact on the population and the outcomes of cats at the ACC shelters.
Exploring this trend in the data leads to evidence of the only two seasons inside the walls of the Animal Care Center, Kitten Season and the rest of the year. From the beginning of May to the end of September, the cats of New York City are mating and giving birth. The number of stray cats entering the shelter skyrockets.
This total intake of stray cats begins to climb in early spring usually around April. Kitten Season officially begins and May and the graph reflects the spike in numbers each year. There is usually a slight drop mid-summer before another spike then a steady decline from the end of September into the winter.
UX testing showed that without the name of each month on the x-axis, users had difficulty understanding how long of a time period this was graphed over and ended up making estimations about the length of the time period and when exactly spikes occurred based on their experience with this information. With the dates on the bottom, every user was able to see that it was a three year period as well as define kitten season and when it occurred during the year.
While a coherent graph that highlights kitten season while contrasting the number of different outcomes between cat and dog was not possible, these two bar graphs side by side allows the user to see that information as best as possible.
The increased cat population is evident in the outcomes during kitten season each year. The number of cats transferred to New Hope Rescues increases while the dog transfers are steady except for one anomaly. Adoptions go up for both cats and dogs during this time of year but the cat numbers show a more dramatic change between kitten season months and the rest of the year. 2015 and 2016 saw major increases in Humane Euthanasia numbers for cats. In 2017, the total numbers and increase from month to month were significantly smaller and less dramatic. The number of dogs euthanized follows a steady pattern, rising in the warmer, kitten season, months and falling in the winter. The number of pets returned to their owner goes up because this is the time of year that they will be outside and able to get lost. The death in shelter numbers are almost all from kitten season with the number of cats dying in the shelter quadrupling the number of dogs because of the number of nursing kittens brought in without their mother.
This last graph is almost superfluous but I found it was an interesting fact and good visual. Dogs make up 60% of the animals being brought to the shelter by an owner requesting euthanasia but are only 40% of the animals being euthanized. Meanwhile, cats make up 40% of euth requests but 60% of the total euthanized animals.
UX Testing
UX testing was done twice. The first round took place after the creation of the first draft of graphs. Three Animal Care Center employees were individually asked for initial responses to the graphs. A series of follow up questions regarding aesthetic choices as well as the effectiveness of the graphs at conveying specific information. The reactions were overall negative. The consensus was that the information conveyed was shallow and so broad that it did not visualize anything beyond common sense shelter statistics. Almost all the information specifically asked about was received but two of the graphs were still considered overwhelming or confusing by the majority of the group. Other aesthetic changes were suggested.
Based on this user testing, the data was reduced and reshaped so it would allow for more Measures and easier to work with in Tableau. Color choices were also changed; based on the users’ perceiving that the cats being represented with red while the dogs were blue gave a negative connotation to the felines.
The second round of user testing was done after redoing the graphs almost entirely. The same process was repeated with two members of the public and one of the same Animal Care Center employees. While not perfect, the reception was much better. The members of the public were able to comprehend the visualizations and took away the intended information. The ACC employee considered it a big improvement, that while still only conveying the broader trends in the shelter population, it worked as a reinforcement of their vague ideas of the population better than the previous graphs.
Revisions
Further revisions on this project would include using a larger and more detailed dataset. If a year’s worth of data would still need to be cut, it would be the 2015 data rather than the 2018 data. The 2015 data was preserved based on there being more variables to facet the information and build the graphs with. Most of these variables ended up being irrelevant or not easily integrated into the overall theme of the visualizations. Using the 2018 data would provide a more up to date visualization. The ACC is very cautious with their data and what is publically available only scratches the surface of their animal populations and shelter procedures. A more detailed dataset would have allowed me to incorporate different types of visualizations such as a map or network.