Data Science Salaries - Group 19

Reviewer: Group 18

Great work, team! I love how relevant and "timely" the app is, to many of us; and you have done a great job on delivering it. Below are some suggestions to make the app even better!

Persona

Provide 3 pieces of constructive feedback that could help the app to be better suited to the scenario it was designed for

In the usage scenario, Heroku needs to know how remote Data Science jobs compare with in-person jobs. Thus, I would suggest adding a chart to illustrate how the remote nature of the job impacts the salary by using the RemoteWork variable.
To answer the stated research question "Data Science professionals in which countries are paid the highest?", I think it would be helpful to add a ranking plot of countries sorted by the salary statistics (i.e. median) so that users can quickly see the top five countries that pay data scientists the highest. The current world map is helpful, but is not as efficient when comparing countries.
According to the usage scenario, Heroku wants to compare salaries in quite a few ways: (1) by country: Canada vs. US, (2) by education level: PhD vs. master's level, and (3) by work location: remote vs. in-person. If Heroku is a typical user for whom the dashboard is designed to help, I would suggest adding some sort of functionality where users can do comparison easily.

Provide 3 pieces of constructive feedback that could help the app to be better suited to the user(persona) it was designed for

It is likely that the user would be most interested in the salary distribution based on his/her own age, gender, education level, and coding experience. Thus, I suggest adding the capability to filter out those characteristics simultaneously. For example, if the user is a woman, she may primarily be interested in woman's salary distribution; therefore, she may not need to see the boxplot by gender.
Coding experience is a key factor affecting placement and salary of newly graduated data science students. Therefore, I appreciate how the dashboard highlights its roles by giving it a substantial portion of the dashboard. However, I do not find the current version of this section very intuitive and effective, so there is more room for improvement. For example, I am not clear about the filter question "Are you a Data Scientist?"; or the interactive plot for each country seems to be more detailed than needed.
Another possible improvement could be to give the option of using the converted currency in USD or the original currency as in the original data set. A Chinese user, for instance, who is only interested in the labor market in China, may prefer not to do all the conversion between USD and CNY.

Frontend / layout

Is the text (plot labels / titles / subtitles) easy to read?
- Yes, the text is suitable and easy to read.
Are the plots selected appropriate for the data? Can you think of other alternatives or improvements for the plots regarding interactivity/reactivity or plot selection?
- Overall, the plots selected are appropriate for the data. In order to improve the users' experience in interacting with the plot, I recommend creating a "persona builder" where a user can filter out age, gender, education level, and coding experience simultaneously to discover how salaries are distributed according to their own profile.
Was the dashboard organized in a way that was easy to read (columns / rows) or you would suggest a change in this sense?
- Creating well-separated sections (such as age, gender, education, etc.) for chart(s) of the same theme with clear titles will help users understand the dashboard better. It appears that the salary slider currently only affects the charts related to age, with no clear implications in the dashboard.
Would you prefer including tabs / navbars to improve the navigation or you think it is better to visualize everything in one screen by the nature of the content?
- Yes, with the current layout of the dashboard, I would prefer adding tabs to improve the navigation. The single dashboard page currently shows many charts of different aspects/levels of data, which might be confusing to first-time users.
- An example suggestion: The world-level charts could be displayed in their own tab with (1) chart 1 showing the median salary of countries in descending order (as it is now), and (2) chart 2 showing the rank of countries by median salary (as suggested above).
Are the plots or other images described properly for the persona described?
- Yes, the plots are described properly for the persona.

Backend

Are the options that you can select in the widgets working fine or have you found some cases where it is not working?
- Yes, the options that I can select in the widgets are working nicely.
If there are interactive plots: are the labels clear and easy to understand?
- Yes, the labels are clear and easy to understand.
- A small suggestion: The right side bottom panel could be size-optimized to fit in a 100 % view browser; or a scroll option could be introduced by enabling autoscroll in the respective container.

Documentation

Was the documentation easy to understand from the README.md how to use the app? How could the documentation be improved?
- Yes, the documentation is succinct and easy to understand. There is not much room for improvement since the documentation is clear in all aspects such as stating objective, data source, and image of dashboard.
Was the app intuitive to use without reading the documentation? What information could be good to include?
- Yes, the app was intuitive to use. While the world map is informative, I would recommend adding a ranking plot of top five countries list in terms of salary statistics (i.e. median pay, average pay per unit experience, etc) (as suggested in the Persona section) will be a great takeaway.

Indicate something you would like to include in your own app after reviewing this one

I like the fact that the team make use of the data available and build the analysis from many aspects. If given more time, our group would definitely try to do the same.

UBC-MDS / DSCI532-peer-review

Data Science Salaries - Group 19 #1

To complete by the group

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Reviewer: Group 18