Spring quarter blog post 2

This week Senem and I worked on the mock up for our new project. We thought about creating a ‘Report’ feature, where Zorzal employees could see the daily activity of the cacao shipments. We thought of the Report as being an inverted version of the already existing Search feature. In Search, users can look up a specific barcode and retrieve information about that shipment (dates and times, forms, boxes inside the shipment, etc). But, you can’t see the big picture. You can’t analyze trends in the short or long term. With a Report, on the other hand, Zorzal employees could do just that.

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We are thinking of creating daily, weekly, and monthly reports (as shown above). They would each consist of a graph that plots the number of units scanned through each checkpoint. For the ‘Daily’ plot, the graph would only show data from the current day. And, for the ‘Weekly’ and ‘Monthly’ plots, the graphs would show data from the past week or month, respectively. 
As you can see from the picture above, we have color coded the different checkpoints. That’s because there would also be different graphs depending on whether the user wanted to zoom in on a specific checkpoint or just view the general trend. In other words, the user could select “Fermentation” and only the shipments in fermentation would be plotted; the x-axis would only show the action checkpoints for “Fermentation”.
We were also thinking of creating a function that would allow the user to compare two different times. For example, if the user was checking out the Daily Report, they could go to the Date icon and pick two different days and the plots for both days would show up in the graph. The same would go for the weekly and monthly graphs.

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The next feature we were thinking of incorporating is a visual representation of the Zorzal supply chain (shown above). This is meant to display the same information as the graph but in a different way. In this graphic, we would have boxes with the name of the action point and the number of shipments that passed it. There would also be arrows depicting the movement of the cacao (not shown). Also, if you were to hover over a box (look at Drying Information 9), a small pop up would list additional information regarding the shipments—this is still up for discussion. 
    As for next steps, Senem and I will be working on extracting data from Firebase and connecting it to the graphs. We also hope to talk to Charles soon and get feedback. But, even if Charles does not find these graphs useful, it will still be valuable to learn how to retrieve this data.

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