Productivity Dashboard

Advisor: Amy Csizmar Dalal

Background

Carleton students (and faculty!) have a lot to keep track of. Between emails (oh so many emails), Slack and Discord messages, calendar events, web links, due dates, coursework, work schedules…there's so much data coming at us each and every day.

Data capture is a crucial part of any productivity system — keeping track of all incoming information, and putting it somewhere where we can process it and make sense of it (and then schedule it). If you're familiar with the Getting Things Done system, “capture” is the first part of this process.

Capture without curation is just chaos. It would be nice if we had one location in which to curate all of our incoming information, so that can see more clearly what's coming up and make better decisions about how we spend our limited time and energy.

Having an effective system is not just another toy for high achievers and productivity nerds. Neurodiverse students also benefit from robust systems that capture and curate incoming information in clear and concise ways, and can help them see without distraction what's coming up and what to prioritize.

The project

In this project, you will create a dashboard that aggregates, curates, and displays information gleaned from various sources: your calendar, todo apps, scraped from Moodle, etc. To create this dashboard, you will need to:

Identify the target audience. What user roles does your potential audience occupy? What are the productivity goals and supporting tasks of your target audience? What tools and strategies do they currently use to capture, curate, and display incoming information, and how do these fall short?
Determine from which data sources to capture information (what are the inputs of interest?)
Determine how to systematically access that information — API calls, data download, web scraping, etc.
Determine how to process information in wildy different formats (as this data will be).
Determine how to display the information — what's the default time horizon, what to include / prioritize, etc.
Design, implement, and test a dashboard that fulfills your target audience's goals (including usability testing!).

Deliverables

A dashboard that aggregates data from multiple sources.

Recommended experience

HCI and/or Data Visualization would be helpful, but are not strictly necessary for this project.

References/inspiration

To be added later.

Final Results

Final Results 2