ZSoc The Online Social Analysis
We dcrucs.co recently built an app to analyze posts of a Facebook page. The obvious choice for us was pages of online ecommerce companies that operate in India. We selected six pages that include Flipkart, SnapDeal, Amazon (India), Infibeam, ShopClues and JustDial.
Our business analyst Pankaj started with a very simple idea to create graphs that signify something very simple and important. With that in mind the exploratory data analysis began (just in case if you don’t know what EDA is check this post here.). After a good look a the raw data in spreadsheets a few basic graphs were plotted and thus began the journey of zsoc.
Below are a few hand-drawn graphs for conceptualization.
Yes we rely heavily on hand drawn artifacts because at dcrucs.co we strongly feel that design and intuition go hand in hand and to get the most of it we use the very basic tools available.
Here’s another one.
Once the objectives were decided and the conceptualization was finalized, it was time to get down and dirty i.e. build the app.
Our obvious choice was to use R programming language as it has ample of libraries and it is easy to learn. The other obvious choice was to use shiny. It is a very nice and simple library to build dashboards quickly. And is fairly easy to learn although it needs a very very little knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS.
The initial iterations were very simple and raw, the idea was to build a pipeline first so that iterative changes would be easy to deploy and inspect. The pipeline was built in a day and once that was set, it was all small incremental changes and builds, as many would call it agile ;).
A few experiments we decided not to include for various reasons mostly technical. Wordclouds!
Finally after a week of hard work our engineers at dcrucs.co were able to build a complete functional dashboard that would be consumable by industry people in market research or page owners.
A look at final product.
A final report worded by our business analysts have been put out and is available for you to read.
You can also take a peek at ZSOC. Do let us know if you think it is cool or otherwise. Feedback is always welcome.
You can contact us at: info@dcrucs.co
