Linh Huynh
Dashualize
For this project, I worked with 6 other classmates for our Software Projects class. We were to design and development a dashboard that allows selection and data visualization. I worked with another classmate to focus more on the UX Design side and visualization of this project.
Executive summary:
This project was to create an interactive dashboard that is based around the idea of displaying Data Scientists job listings. The outline of this project was inspired by an article written by Jeff Hale, "The Most in Demand Skills for Data Scientists". There are 4 user types we had to focus on, HR, Management, Workforce Planning, and Job Seekers. We were also had to try and get data for Technology skills, Soft skills, Locations, Pay range, and Job boards.
Process:
The first thing we did for this project was to decide on what tool to use to create the dashboard and how to start data mining to extract the data we would need. We did some research and decided to use Tableau to create the dashboard and code in Python to extract the data. While the backend team of this project was working on data extraction, I was playing around with data provided in the article to start creating different dashboards.
While playing around with the given data, we started to research more on how to display data on dashboards. We would share different dashboards we found and see if it would fit our need and make our layout to be similar. With the more research we did, we got to make the dashboard look less chaotic and made it so it can be scrollable and have the data more spread out.
We at first thought to just make one dashboard for all four user types since the data they would be looking at are similar. So we created a mockup website where the corporate users and job seekers would have their own login page but have the same dashboard display.
What we started to realize as the project went on was that we needed to host the website in order to have an interactive dashboard. We decided to use Wordpress since they had plug-ins that we could use and did not have to hard code if we were to make the site from scratch. Another thing we realized later on in the project was that we needed to have four different dashboards for each user type because they do see different data. With this, we had to do research and understand what role each user type have and what data they would be interested in seeing.
We were only able to host the website for a short amount of time, so below are the screenshots of the website hosted on Wordpress.
At this point of the project, we were towards the end of the project but still had trouble with the data extraction. We had to pick specific keywords to extract data from each job boards. We also had to limit how many job postings to extract before the job board locks us out. Once the data are extracted, they are put into a table in Excel to use for data visualization with Tableau.
Once we were able to extract all the data we need, we created the four different dashboards below:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/julia1514#!/vizhome/DashboardMarch3/Management
https://public.tableau.com/profile/julia1514#!/vizhome/DashboardMarch3/WorkforcePlanning
https://public.tableau.com/profile/julia1514#!/vizhome/DashboardMarch3/HR
https://public.tableau.com/profile/julia1514#!/vizhome/DashboardMarch3/JobSeeker?publish=yes
Reflection:
Working on this interactive dashboard allowed me to learn how to apply my UX design skills in something that isn't a web or mobile application. I was able to create and research on how to make the dashboard display data that would best fit each user type and work with another UX designer. The one thing I would change about this project is how long it took us to get the data extraction code and making the website still be active. We should have spent more time making the website on our own so we didn't have to do a hosting that stopped after the class ended. Overall, this project allowed me to know what it is like to work with another UX designer and to collaborate with other software developers.