2018-10-16 Check-in
- Ben Leibert
- Clay Crosby (Unlicensed)
Date
Oct 16, 2018
Attendees
@Clay Crosby (Unlicensed)
@Swetha Srinath (Unlicensed)
@Timoteo Chaluco (Unlicensed)
@Felimone Amone Junior
@Dércio Duvane
@Aida Coelho (Unlicensed)
@Ben Leibert
Discussion items
Project Staffing
Swetha is part of a new "Data Analytics" team at VillageReach, has some thoughts about the PAV Dashboard, and can play an important role in helping ensure its success. Welcome to the project!
Ben will take on many of Christine’s duties vis-à-vis the PAV project. Christine along with Mary Jo and Brandon will still monitor the project’s progress, but will play passive roles for now. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Ben for anything related project related.
SELV’s Stockouts
We now have actionable business requirements, and Ben will follow up about them via email.
SSL Certificate
The NexLeaf section of the dashboard doesn’t currently work, and it seems this is because its TLS certificate expired. We use Let’s Encrypt and should upgrade our infrastructure such that it automatically renews the short-lived certificates that they issue.
Documentation
Over the next 8 months of support, we should document the necessary workarounds for any recurring issues.
Data Refresh Schedule
DHIS-2 data for month X is currently retrieved on the 11th of X as well as on the 1st of X+1. Consequently, there is no data for X prior to the 11th. By default, however, the dashboard shows data for the most recent period, which means that it shows nothing prior to the 11th. This is obviously confusing.
Furthermore, even our moderate use of DHIS-2 has caused it to crash several times. This problem is compounded by the fact that no one seems to notice: the ministry left DHIS-2 down for two weeks until we notified them of the issue. We don’t want to put the MoH on the defensive though, and if possible, it may therefore be best to avoid raising this problem with them. It’s not at all clear that they’d be able to solve it anyway.
To address these issues, we’ll plan to throttle (stagger) our retrieval of information from DHIS-2 even further. @Clay Crosby (Unlicensed) will touch base with Antonate, but we’ll tentatively plan to A) pull data for just 1 or 2 provinces per day, and B) make it very clear to users that we’re doing so. (We should probably add a note to the UI.)
Additionally, rather than having dashboards show the most recent reporting-period by default, we’ll show all year-to-date information. This will alleviate the problem wherein staggered data-retrieval causes an empty dataset to be presented by default. It’s okay that viewing the dashboard in January will show an empty dataset. Properly labeling the dataset as “Year to Date” will make clear to the users why the display is empty.
Tables
The dashboard’s current tables are valuable. They let users delve in to the underlying data if and when they need, and offer a convenient way of allowing users to download the data. Simultaneously, the tables make the dashboard feel unwieldy and overwhelming. They don’t provide any insights-at-a-glance, which is really the purpose of a dashboard. It would therefore be best to move them into a dedicated dashboard called something like “Detail” or “Raw Data.”
If it’s not too much work, it would be nice to provide links: Charts in the main dashboard would be accompanied by links to the underlying data-tables in the “Detail” dashboard.
Labels
Some of our labels read “last year.” This sounds like year-to-date, but the data shown is actually for the past 12 months. We should tweak this.
Superset
Our instance of Superset is a bit old, and likely doesn’t have the latest Portuguese translations. It would be a good idea to upgrade it.
Filters
The placement of filters depends on the user’s screen size. Often, they’re position is such that it seems they apply exclusively to a specific chart or table rather than to the entire dashboard.
@Clay Crosby (Unlicensed) mentioned that Superset now supports the use of tabs on the same dashboard. We should probably adopt them in order to A) reduce the need for scrolling and B) visually clarify that the filters apply to the tab in its entirety.
Visual Indicators
Because our charts present so much information, they make it hard to glean take-aways. Taking Coverage as an example, it would be really helpful to min-and-max values. If it’s easiest to do so, this may even be a good time to use a table. @Swetha Srinath (Unlicensed) and @Timoteo Chaluco (Unlicensed) will come up with min/max indicators they'd like to see.
Use of conditional formatting (eg: green for good and red for bad) may help as well. This can potentially be achieved by Superset’s support for "annotation layers." (Ben’s note: This is a new and unknown feature; I think we’ll want to carefully weigh the likely level of effort before committing to any features dependent on it.)
Provinces
Provinces appear multiple times with our tables, which can be confusing. Reorganizing the tables by year -> month -> province would make them easier to read.
Project Schedule
@Antonate Maritim (Unlicensed) is committed to another project through Friday, and Ona will be on a company-wide retreat next week. @Clay Crosby (Unlicensed), however, can work on cosmetic issues this week.
Action items
(We ultimately decided against resurrecting Jira.)