Oasis Data Visualization
Prompt
A few weeks after your kickoff meeting, your team is digging into the design process of Oasis Food’s order forecasting system. Through user interviews, you have learned that the clients keep track of their orders in Excel sheets and are frustrated by the manual labor and potential for error. They also complain about figuring out what the data means—they want an easier way to draw insights without having to crunch the numbers themselves.
One way to improve the accessibility of data is to visualize the information in a data dashboard. Dashboards provide a centralized resource from which managers can easily draw insights. In this case, the owners of Oasis Foods would like to know when to order more stock-keeping units (SKUs) of each item, as well as whether certain times of year are more popular for particular items.
In order to do that, you have been provided with a spreadsheet that contains simplified versions of Oasis Food’s sales and orders data for 10 days in October. Using that information, come up with a design for a dashboard that accurately reflects how many SKUs of each item are in the store at once. The dashboard should also reflect trends over time, so owners can forecast trends for specific months or times of the year.
Your design should include a mockup of the dashboard—using the data in the spreadsheets to show Oasis Food’s SKUs as of October 10, 2020. Assume Oasis began the month of October with 500 SKUs of each item.
Details
Look through Oasis Food’s data to get a sense of their sales & orders.
Brainstorm ways to represent the data. You could use different types of charts, graphs, or simply tables. There is no right answer, but keep the client in mind—what do they need to know?
To create the tables, you may want to manipulate the Excel data. For instance, you might want to calculate how many SKUs are currently in the store as of 10/10/20.
Using Microsoft or Google graphs & charts and whatever layout software you like, create a mockup of the data dashboard.
For each chart in your mockup, include a brief annotation or footnote to explain why you chose the particular graph, chart, or figure. What does this say to the client and why is it important?
