DATA 551 is a project-based course where you will be working in a team of 3-4 students with the goal of designing a dashboard for interactive data visualization, exploration, and communication. We expect that this project will take up a vast majority of your time dedicated to this course. In addition to principles of effective dashboard development, this project will allow you to practice concept design, prototyping and platform evaluation, as well as creating a final product for a target user.
You will create a scenario for your dashboard, which includes choosing the target audience (internal research team, public communication, etc), who you are (part of a company, NGO, research team, student group, etc), and the goal of building the app for your target audience (communicating your research to the public, deriving market insight, driving end user decision making, etc). It is fine if your plans change slightly as you are building the app, but try to stick to it as much as possible so that you have a clear direction throughout, or update your plan/scenario as needed. As a team you will agree on how to work during this project and formalize it by writing a teamwork contract.
As in a real-world project, you will then evaluate two different technology stacks:
- Dash with Python + Altair and,
- Dash with R and ggplotly.
by building a prototype of an interactive dashboard in each of the two stacks.
You will write a brief analysis on your experience in each stack, and then choose one to build a more refined dashboard. In your analysis, you should include which criteria you used to evaluate the two stacks and clearly explain why you chose the stack you did. You will then get and incorporate feedback into one final round of improvements to finalize your dashboard in one of the two stacks.
This process will be spread out over four milestones.
In milestone 1, you will do following things:
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In your group, review the EDA from Lab 4 of Data 550 with your group mates, and together, select one of the datasets for your interactive dashboard.
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Create/develop a scenario where your dashboard will answer a big question for a particular audience, or solve a problem. Basically, your task is to come up with a compelling purpose for your dashboard to exist.
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Write the teamwork contract and establish expectations and norms of working together.
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Sketch a vision for your dashboard (on paper or a drawing app); you may choose to have two sketches, one for a realistic, achievable dashboard and another as a "stretch goal", something you can do if everything goes according to plan.
In milestone 2, you will create and deploy a prototype dashboard in Python, using Altair and Dash.
In milestone 3, you will create and deploy a prototype dashboard in R, using ggplotly and DashR.
Pick a technology stack (Python using Altair and Dash OR Milestone 3 - R using ggplotly and DashR), explain and justify your choice, and then create a final version of your dashboard incorporating any feedback you have received from user testing.