The Brief
As a public body, VisitAberdeenshire is concerned with encouraging tourism through the development of the local business community. One of the key ways they do this is through the monitoring and publication of tourism to the area. This kind of report can often be overwhelming for business owners to digest making them counter-intuitive to their purpose. We were tasked with creating a new data dashboard that illustrates tourism trends in a visual, and therefore more engaging, way.
Our Solution
This project had two main focus areas. Firstly, put in place a system of data input that was simple and time effective to ensure the statistics and insights are always up-to-date and relevant to current research. To do this we used Umbraco, our preferred CMS, allowing VisitAberdeenshire to manually input data without the time needed to create a full report which in turn gives local businesses access to insights as soon as they are available.
Secondly, we needed to make the data as visually appealing as possible to help business owners engage with the data. As a jumping off point, we aligned the UI to the full VisitAberdeenshire site to ensure that the dashboard didn’t feel like an add on but rather an integral extension of the tourism site.
The visualisation of data on the dashboard is presented in different ways depending on the information included and its purpose. While some areas are snapshots of specific areas of interest, others convey data trends. Each topic contains key insights into what the data means and clearly marked links to full reports. This makes it much easier for businesses to skim for key take-aways while still providing access to a wealth of information should they need it as well as encouraging exploration of the data.
