Data was collected at the Indooroopilly McDonalds drive thru on a Wednesday and Saturday evening between 6-9pm. The information was collected first-hand and recorded into a premade data table in Microsoft Word. Several variables were collected when observing the fast food restaurant, those being the physical time, the taken from the start to end of the drive thru, type of car, how many passengers in the car, gender of the passengers, whether there were children present and the number of fries boxes ordered on the night. After collecting the data, it was collated and exported into Microsoft Excel for analysis.
Our first infographic illustrated the number of people in each car. This poll facilitated our preliminary research information that many young people don’t feel competent in the kitchen and are opting for much more convenient options such as fast food. The data was visualised as a bar graph using fountain soft drinks to display the data. Proportionally sized drinks represented the number of passengers in each car and the height of each straw represented the number of vehicles with that certain number of passengers.
The multivariate infographic compared key variables that continued our storyline
and highlighted the endings of our data. The graphic illustrated the amount of vehicles that had used drive thru, the time, the duration of each vehicle to order and receive their meal and the comparison between the Wednesday evening and the Saturday evening. In order to construct this graph, we had to convert the time we recorded from minutes and seconds to purely seconds, as we represented duration as the size of each dot point on the graph. By having time in seconds we were able to apply percentages to time so that the user could visually compare the size of each bubble as longer or shorter duration. The multivariate is a crucial part of the story as it highlights the heavy amount of use (number of cars and time) and the efficiency of being able to order and collect your food within minutes (duration).
The physical representation of the data we collected analysed the sheer amount of food being bought as well as consumed in the three-hour window we surveyed. Homaging the iconic “Would you like fries with that?” we collected how many small, medium and large fries were purchased. We sourced the weight (grams) of each size and multiplied the results to gather the total grams of fries sold throughout the evening.
