Self Assessments

In data visualization, design

Visualizations of my own annual review self assessments.


I loath having to have the one big annual review session where you have to remember all the stuff you said you would do and whether or not you did it. In order to make this experience less dreaded I started tracking my daily routines/work so I could 1) take a data-driven approach and 2) visualize that to see if any new insights could be gained.

I wondered what my years actually looked like in data. How much time do I spend in meetings? Programming? Designing? Strategizing?

Turns out there were some interesting trends/insights I noticed that I hadn’t initially understood about my daily work. The visualizations below represent 3 different years where my personal focus/goals evolved.

Year 1: For this review I did not feel the review criteria would represent a designer’s contributions to business goals so my intention was to breakdown my work into 3 very specific categories and emphasize creativity, technical ability, and day-to-day production ability.

Year 2: For this review I had really shifted my focus from pure design to design + development and wanted to be able to reflect that in my accomplishments and also show how important programming and technical skills can be to business goals.

Year 3: For this review I had worked a lot on data visualization and the business in general had made huge pushes to do more with data storytelling. I wanted to emphasize how my background in visual design combined with almost equal time spent on programming improved the quality of data visualizations to reiterate the importance of design to business goals.

Note: Company logos/naming have been removed at the client’s request and most text has been replaced with Lorem Ipsum.