The dashboard graphs should look prettier for a better user experience
Currently we are using the plotly.js library to create the graphs in the web based dashboard, and it was chosen because it had been used by the R based prototype.
It turns out that plotly is a big and very powerful library, suitable for displaying huge amounts of data, optimized for scientific data. However, it contains little support for "fancy" and animated graphs, which might limit us on delivering a good user experience.
I believe we should evaluate alternatives to it, and quickly googling I found this page with a list of some graph/chart libraries:
https://medium.com/@alberto.park/a-simple-guide-how-to-select-a-chart-library-to-use-6f17878248f0
For me the minimal requirements for such libraries are:
- open source/free software
- easy to use
- supporting responsive design
- support desktop and mobile mode
- support high variety of graphs that we currently use and that we can potentially need in the future (which ones?)
- support for useful animation, especially when a graph is live-updated
- currently maintained and good community around it.
- support for running offline, without requiring an active internet connection.
- small number of dependencies, and preferably being single-bundled (not requiring manual inclusion of the dependencies)
- as small as possible, less than 1Mb compressed with gzip.
- interactive, so that we can plug actions to user actions on the graph entries (for obtaining more information about a domain, for instance).