Charty help with grouping data

iOS Charty
,
1

I’m new to Charty and data viz in general and am having trouble wrapping my mind around how to conceptualize what I’m trying to do.

Basically, I’m building a task tracker that I am using to record when I start and stop a task and my focus rating for the task. I’d like to build a series of charts to represent that data in a variety of ways.

Here’s what I’m capturing:

[
  {
    "rating": "2",
    "start": "2021-11-23 16:53",
    "intention": "last test",
    "stop": "2021-11-23 16:55",
    "project": "Tinkering",
    "total": 2,
    "day": "Tuesday",
    "notes": "some stuff",
    "date": "2021-11-23",
    "wentLonger": false,
    "complete": true,
    "hour": "16"
  },
  {
    "rating": "1",
    "start": "2021-11-22 16:41",
    "day": "Monday",
    "wentLonger": false,
    "stop": "2021-11-22 16:51",
    "date": "2021-11-22",
    "project": "Tinkering",
    "total": 10,
    "complete": true,
    "notes": "Some stuff",
    "intention": "testing again",
    "hour": "16"
  }
]

“Total” here represents total minutes worked. “Rating” is a 1-5 scale of focus. “Complete” is whether I completed the task I set. “wentLonger” is whether I worked past my designated length. “hour” is just a convenience entry for the hour of the day (as is “day” and “date”).

As you can anticipate, there will be several entries per day. I’m wondering how to represent this in Charty. If I want to make a chart that displays something like:

number of minutes worked & the average rating per calendar date

How would I group dates using Charty? Or would I need to calculate the daily totals in shortcuts somehow before sending to Charty?

Here’s another viz I can imagine:

a stacked bar chart showing me on the y axis the days of the week (M,T,W,T,F,S,S) and on the X axis a stacked bar showing me percentage of sessions worked at each of the 5 focus levels (e.g., maybe I have lots of 4’s on Thursdays and lots of 2’s on Mondays).

or maybe

some kind of visualization showing me same as above but with hours of the day instead of days of the week.

Would love to find some way to get started here. I’m kind of at a loss and the tutorials on the Charty site aren’t helping me much with this. Maybe also because I don’t have much data yet. I’m sort of trying to decide what form / type of data I need for the viz so that I can collect it in the right way.

Thanks for any tips or guidance!!

2

It seems to me you’ve got a data visualization question here much more than an app-specific Charty question.

First figure out what you want to show and how. Then think about how to do that with Charty, or come as close as possible.

It isn’t my job but I make charts a lotto work, sometimes with moderately complex data, and I work with people who’ve made careers out of data visualization. At least at first glance, what you’re trying to do strikes me as fairly complex. You’re trying to turn several dimensions of data (time, duration, completeness, topic/category …) into one or more two dimensional charts.

I tend to think about charts (in a simple charting tool) as offering maybe three controls: two axes and color. You can add a few more by combining several charts into one viz — eg, a separate chart for each theme or some tome period, like a week or month. That’s about it.

Of course, you can do multiple visualizations — by day, by week, by topic…

So figure out what you care most about first. From your descriptions, it sounds like you care most about your focus rating. Maybe start with simple charts showing focus by topic and date (eg, average focus for each topic for each week). Then go from there.

2 Likes
3

I appreciate your comment here–it’s totally right. I am just getting my feet wet here and learning what it is I want to do.

I think this is the first chart I want to work on and am not sure whether Charty has some features that help here. Charty can “group” data, but the options are perplexing to me. The name “group” suggests that maybe it can aggregate the data for me by “date” (that is, add up all the minutes worked on a particular day and average out the focus rating) but I’m not sure what all the options mean. The documentation is a little terse.