UFO Analysis with JavaScript

I. Overview of Project

Background

Dana is a data journalist writing about her hometown McMinnville, Oregon. Her hometown is famous for UFO sightings and even has an annual gathering of UFO enthusiasts. For this project, I have been helping her analyzing and scraping a set of data in JavaScript format. We have created an app to deploy JavaScript functions to loop through and filter the data, and then created a HTML file to populate the data table using JavaScript. On the HTML file, we added a filter button to filter data on date. Finally, we also used Bootstrap and CSS stylesheet to customize the visualization.

Purpose

The purpose of this challenge is to provide a more in-depth analysis of UFO sightings by allowing users to filter for multiple criteria at the same time. Besides date, I also added city, state, country and shape. In addition, I have removed the button and set the form to update automatically when the input of filter changes on the website.

II. Results -- Description of how to perform a search

Structure:

• The very top part is a navigation bar with text “UFO Sightings”.
• Right below vav bar is a jumbotron written “The Truth Is Out There” with an image background.
• Next section has two parts of content: left section has a header “UFO Sightings: Fact of Fancy?” and a sub-header “Ufologists Weigh In”; right section contains a paragraph of information.
• The bottom left section is the filter input form, where users can input one or multiple filters by date, city, state, country and shape.
• The bottom right section is the data table, which updates with filter inputs.

Instruction:

Click HERE to access to the website.

• In Filter Search section, input desired date，the table will update to results by that specific date.

  

• OR, enter any other one or any multiple filters, press Enter, the data table will update to filtered data.

  

• Click top of the page “UFO Sightings” in nav bar to reset the filter form and data table.

  

III. Summary

Drawback

The users must have basic knowledge of the data before conducting a search. For example, the user must know the available date, cities, states, countries, and shapes in the dataset in order to get data returned. If the users randomly type a city that she/he wants to search for, for instance, Honolulu, she/he will get nothing returned becasue Honolulu is not available in the dataset.

Recommendations

• To address above drawback, it would be better if there’s a drop-down menu/list for each filter. Therefore, the users will know available elements within each filter to avoid typing invalid input.
• It would be a more optimal user experience if there is a button at the bottom of Filter Search Section to confirm the search action.
• Another recommendation for development in the future is that we can remove the Filter Search Section and implement drop-down filter menu on the table header. Each filter has a drop-down, users would be able to filter the data directly in the table.