Week 3 Project Public Trade Companies Stocks

by Alessandro Costanzo

Last week DS13 project involved the creation of a dashboard using historical shares data downloaded from finance.yahoo.com.

Each of us was assigned a public-listed company with the aim of producing a visualisation which would convince the audience to invest in this company.

It was also required to use a minimum of two table calculations, a topic which has been discussed in detail earlier in the week.

The main difficulty of this project can be found in the lack of knowledge that most of us DSers had in regard to the functioning of the stock market.

Due to this fact, I had to spend most of my allocated time in background research on this topic.

Here you can see my final result. I have removed the logo and references to the original company because due to my little knowledge of this topic I may have misinterpreted some of this financial data.

The main lesson I’ve learned this week is when to realise that you’ve produced something “good enough”. For this project, we had 4 hours in total. During 3 of those hours, I had no clue on what to include in the final dashboard. Then after various testing, I found a way to use the table calculation I needed, and I started to sketch my dashboard.

I’ve built the entire dashboard in around half an hour. Due to this, I had to prioritise some elements, like the explanatory texts, over others, like tooltip formatting. I do feel that overall the elements I prioritised were the most important to convey a story during a presentation, hence the most appropriate for my aim.

I think that learning what prioritise will be essential during our consultancy working schedule. Often in companies, the time constraints represent a real challenge and I’m glad that these Friday projects are helping us to getting used to them.