Dashboard week sees DS'ers being given a brief at 9am, making a dashboard based on the brief and then presenting it at 3:30pm.
On day two of dashboard week, DS56 were given data on Exchange Traded Funds traded on the London Stock Exchange. We were tasked with creating a dashboard for investors that would allow them to have (1) an overview of the market and (2) more detailed information on particular ETFs. We were told to use Power BI for data preparation and dashboard creation.
We were given approximately 5000 tables of data - a table for each ETF on the LSE. Power BI, conveniently, allows entire folders to be inputted into it at once, effectively unioning them. The only other data preparation involved needing to convert an ISO data, held as an integer, into a data type, which was trivial in Power BI.
For each ETF on the LSE, we had a row for each day that was traded. We had fields like its opening price, its closing price, its max and min price, as well as the volume that was traded (the number of that ETF that was traded).
Next, came the planning phase. I began by researching some metrics relevant to investors. I was able to leverage my own experience as an investor (poor track record so far). I realised that the focusing solely on the volume field would be an oversight, given that it does not give an indication of the £ amount traded (multiplying the volume of an ETF by its price, however, yields the £ traded).
Next came the dashboard sketch phase. I like making use of ChatGPT or Gemini for dashboard sketching. As someone whose dashboard design is probably his weakest skill when it comes to things data-related, I like the beautified sketches that an AI tool can make, which then makes my life easier as I merely have to recreate the dashboard that has been sketched.
That being said, our coach stated a very important point to me: stakeholders may lose faith in my abilities if it seems as though I am too reliant on an AI tool. I did not show any of the prompts that I wrote to ChatGPT, and the back and forth we had in order to generate the final sketch. In future, if I make use of an AI tool to sketch again, I will make sure to do two things: (1) independently plan the dashboard myself and then feed detailed prompts into the AI tool and, (2), show stakeholders/those that I am presenting to the prompts, such that they can trust that I was the originator of the ideas, and AI merely helped create the image.
Below is the finished product: