Peer Review

[tejasph]

First off, I want to praise your team on developing this app to a stage that impressed me with its functionality and layout. The organization was concise and used color effectively, while displaying a variety of plots that gave me different insights into movie profit/attendance trends. Despite trying my best to break the app, I discovered no issues with the exception of some lag. The three types (jitter, line, and barplot) offered me many different ways to look at the data and guided my interpretation of trends. Below, I will address four categories of feedback:

Audience Matters:

The target audience, according to the proposal, is business executives in the movie business. Business executives care about profits and are always interested in how the market is for movies, especially if they are looking for new business opportunities. Your dashboard addresses the questions an executive might have (are more people seeing movies in recent years?/ are profits on the rise?) in a succinct and concise manner.

Less is more:
You bar plots and line plots are consistent with the idea of keeping less information. Seeing the top 10 movies helps the users focus their attention on movies that really matter. However, the jitter plot is on the borderline of violating this rule. I can see a lot of merit for the user to hover over individual points to see which movies are outliers, but when the entire time range is used, it is difficult to distinguish where one year ends or another begins. I would consider increasing the width, using animation, or using a violin plot.

Add narrative:
You dash has a lot of tips for first-time users to help them use the dashboard tools in their analysis. I really appreciated the definitions that were provided. The only aspect I was confused with was why there is an inflation option for the "butts in seats" category.

Choose defaults wisely:
The hovering tooltip was very useful for me because it allowed me to get more information on data points or bars that interested me. One suggestion I have is to get rid of the "zoom" functionality on your bar plots as it doesn't seem very useful. You can do this with the following code: ggplotly(your_plot) %>% layout(dragmode = FALSE).

One other minor thing:

• In your "Top 10" barplot, when avatar appears it causes the x-axis ticks to overlap.

Overall, your team has made an impressive app with a lot of useful features which address meaningful research questions that business executives might have. Well done!