Centrality of maps:
The whole interactive is based on the geography of the path of the story nicely. I would have liked the time axis to be added to this in some way. Your rationale for the visual treatment is strong.

Rationale for design choices:
Your “back story” explains how you ended up where you did quite well. Your thoughts about why to show the impact of the storm make sense. Your visual treatment of the map is well thought out, as are your invitations for interaction.

Layers of reading:
The interactive display is built around progressively revealing more detail quite nicely. The 3 -pronged invitation is nice for each place. I also like the invitation to circle an area to make it more interactive and participatory.

Appropriate data use:
Using this data to design an educational display for a museum makes sense. You’ve integrating other data sources well.

Suitability for audience:
The design of a display and wall-map is well thought out. The information included makes sense for the context of the museum. I’m not sure this would work for the youngest audiences, but that’s OK – it is hard to connect to all ages in one piece of a larger exhibit.

Narrative:
This is mostly exploratory, not explanatory. I think some overall framing in the graphic treatment would help a lot to get someone into the piece (even though it is part of a larger exhibit). Some kind of narrative about “on the ground” experience of living through a storm would help frame it – “what does it feel like”, or “I lived through it” or something. I think you’ve thought about this, but I don’t see it baked into your explanation or sketch. Your “look closer”, “explain”, and “zoom out” are a nice take on narrative structure once you’re down in the details of a place.

Another thing that you could update is the clarity of the buttons — if I understand correctly, “look closer” is an option for certain images while “zoom out” and “explain” are options for that entire view. And if there are unambiguous icons you could use (like a + and – magnifying glass) that could help it look less cluttered.

It could also be useful to include prompts to make it clear that the points are clickable from the bigger view, and once the point is clicked, highlight it in a new color (rather than just putting a circle around it) to make it more obvious that the pictures are relevant to that one point.
This was a cool project and I enjoyed seeing your design process!

One thing that I think is worth thinking about is the level of abstraction in your map. You took away a lot of terrain and political markers for the sake of clarity but I think that that kind of context can be important at a certain scale, especially if you’ve chosen a specific place to focus on. Identifying some landmarks between the map and the satellite images might help with making the connection between a visualization and a place people are familiar with.

I also like all the different elements the user can focus on after selecting a point on the line – the images all do a great job at showing the real, on-the-ground cost of the cyclone. One way it could maybe be improved is aligning all the pictures so they’re less cluttered/randomly assorted.

All around, great job!