Help Shape the Ideal Genealogical Dashboard

Question

I am developing a genealogical dashboard for members that will display information about a family, spanning up to 10 generations.

The dashboard aims to provide detailed insights into both your WikiTree account and your ancestors. For instance, we will include sections focusing on Birth related data, such as Birth Decade Distribution (number of births per decade) and Birth Month Distribution (count of individuals born in a specific month). Additionally, there will be a section highlighting more account-related data, like the number of profiles by privacy level.

To ensure the dashboard caters to the needs of a wide variety of members, I highly value your feedback! What types of charts and features would you like to see to better understand your family data?

Here are a couple questions to inspire your thoughts:

• Are there specific data points you'd like to see represented in the charts?
• What chart styles or types would make it easier for you to explore and understand the data?

Please share your thoughts below!

Comments

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but why?

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Will the information on this dashboard be viewable by the specific member only? Or will other members have access to this information? Also, will non-members have access to this information?

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@George - see my comment under Jonathan's answer.

@Lindy - This would only be available to WikiTree members since it will use the API. Some information would be available toother members, but that would depend on the privacy of the profiles, etc.

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Thanks for the reply, Steven!

Answer 1

I guess location, might be interesting, though for me it would have to be 3 levels to provide some variation, so country, region (county in my case), and then parish.

Answer 2

I think Georges question deserves an Answer rather than a comment. Since you want to be all things for all people, maybe you should start with options that ask "what questions are you trying to answer" for the user, and then display things based on that?

For example, I wouldnt care about births per decade, per month, or number of prifiles by privacy. But I would be interested to know which branches are densest or sparsest on my tree; which profiles have the most suggestions that might lead to more sources; which branches have the most uncertain links, etc.

birth country would be handy also.

DNA statistics maybe.

Comments

I think Georges question deserves an Answer rather than a comment.

George's question was - Why?

The main objective of this dashboard is to give members a visual representation of their family data that goes beyond the traditional family tree. By including various data points and visualizations, it can help to provide a deeper understanding of the patterns, trends, and connections within their family.

For example, with the births by decade metric - this can provide insights into:

• Generational trends, such as patterns in family size and structure over different generations.
• Historical context, where births were influenced by historical events such as wars, epidemics, or economic booms.

The Privacy visualization would help members understand how much of their information is publicly available.

I also plan to offer other visualizations, such as: death and mortality rates, life expectancy trends, age distributions, marriage patterns...

And of course, I realize that not every data point and visualization will be useful for all members, but I hope to present the information in such a way as to allow a member to navigate to specific types of data on their own.

Answer 3

I'll throw out a few that may be in a few other locations, but it would be nice to see in a single location.

1) CC7 broken down by each ring, the so-called "missing" connection counts (how many per ring), and total count in each ring.

2) Missing data points (missing dates, places, names, etc.) - in other words, if they don't check the box that says there's "no middle name", then it's missing.

3) Inaccurate data points (Only year or only month in date fields - only country, or country and state/county, but missing city and things of this nature).

4) Data doctor flags count on profiles under management (a simple total count would be good, possibly a link to the reports would be nicer).

5) Profiles under management that fall into a project (count by project perhaps?)

6) Profiles by security level (how many Open, how many Public, etc.)

7) Profiles under management with PPP

8) Change in CC7 over xx time period

9) Profiles with Biography counts of xx (for example, if the Biography section is empty, they would go in a "zero" count list, maybe a 1-25 next, then 26-50, 51-100, 100+ - or something along these lines - not counting other sections like Sources or Research Notes).

10) Breakdown by top ten LNAB under management.

I can probably come up with more suggestions, but these are a few that popped into my head.

Answer 4

Sounds great, Steve!

Do you plan to incorporate Jamie's old Ancestor Statistics app? I think the table she came up with there is very good, but I wish it were a Tree App.

Answer 5

I like this idea Steve - I'm all about the data and charts and graphs and seeing patterns!

One thing that is of interest is the frequency of family names - maybe a top 10 first names (by gender).  You could do the same with last names of course, but that probably tips in favour of paternal lines that continue straight back and not as overall representative.  I've always thought that a Wordle made up of family names would be a cool graphic to be able to generate ... so I throw that challenge out to you as well ..

Sounds like a great - but potentially huge and very daunting project!