Wei Fan

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 backgrounds, such as different data analysis and interpretation skills. Hence, it is questionable what dashboard design could meet the needs of people from different health-related domains. In order to find the answer, I did a pilot study in which I conducted 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.