A Pilot Study to Understand Preferences for the Design of Social Media Dashboards Among Students in Health-Related Disciplines

Abstract

Interactive data dashboards are effective tools that help researchers perform data analysis and identify patterns in large amounts of health-related social media data sets. However, people interested in using dashboards to explore health-related social media data may have different research questions and different backgrounds, such as different data analysis and interpretation skills. Hence, it is questionable what dashboard design could meet the different needs of people from different health-related domains. In order to find the answer, I did a pilot study using interviews with six graduate students. First, I developed a data dashboard containing topic modeling results and an interactive visualization using tweets containing covid-related keywords. Then, I conducted structured interviews with graduate students in Biomedical and Health Informatics and Nursing. I inductively coded the interview transcripts to identify different needs between groups. Finally, I provide suggestions for dashboard design improvements and recruitment suggestions for larger-scale research of better dashboard designs for research using social media data. The study results might generate dashboard and visualization design suggestions that make topic modeling and social network analysis dashboards fit the needs of people in different health-related fields. This study may also pave the way for larger-scale research of better dashboard designs for research using social media data.