Magpi Reports: New Visualizations Added

New Visualizations in Magpi Reports

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just added several new visualizations into our Magpi Reports data visualization system, mainly thanks to great feedback we’ve gotten from users at Oxfam, who are using Magpi for mobile data collection in Southeast Asia.

Below we’ve laid out the new parts, and you can also read more about them in our free — and just-updated — Magpi Report and Dashboard Guide. We hope you like the improvements, and please do keep the suggestions and feedback coming!

Crosstabs Now Available as Graphs as well as Tables

Traditionally in statistics a “crosstab” (also called a contingency table) means a table illustrating the relationship between two variables (read more). In this example, you can see a Magpi crosstab relating two variables: the residence city of the respondent (“City”), and their agreement with some statement (“Agree”). Both variables are multiple choice questions.

In the first version of Magpi Reports, released last fall, we followed standard statistical practice and made our crosstab available only as a table. But as we gathered feedback from users, we realized that we needed to give people the ability to do the same thing — compare two variables — using a graph, in addition to a table.

We could have made this a separate element (maybe a “crossgraph”?), but figured it was simpler just adding it as an option for the existing crosstab report element. So now when you create a Magpi crosstab, you can choose from these options (including the traditional table):

and here are a couple examples showing the same data as above, but in the form of graphs rather than a table:

We’re also happy to announce that you can now create crosstabs from “checkbox” questions (multiple choice questions where you can choose all the responses that apply, rather than just one), not just “radio button” questions.

Visualize Checkbox Questions with “Responses Over Time” Report Element

The initial version of Magpi Reports only allowed you to graph multiple choice questions over time if they were “single-select” questions (i.e. radio button or dropdown questions where the respondent could pick only one response). Now with our new visualizations you can also use “multi-select” checkbox questions (multiple choice questions where you can choose all the responses that apply, rather than just one), as illustrated by this graph displaying work activities reported over time as a stacked column graph:

Keep the Feedback Coming!

We hope you like these new visualizations. We’ll have more coming over the year, and welcome any and all feedback from users: your feedback is our most useful tool to keep improving Magpi.

More information on reports can be found here and in our Magpi Report and Dashboard Guide.

Originally published at Magpi.