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Inspire your organization to stay active using ArcGIS Dashboards (Part 3)

Last, but certainly not least, welcome to Part 3 of your guide to creating a company-wide health engagement initiative. We’ve implemented this at Esri Canada and called it ‘See Every Street’ as a way to motivate our colleagues to stay active. So far, we deployed a Quick Capture project (Part 1)  for data collection and configured a web map (Part 2) to display a vibrant heat map of new and frequented routes. In Part 3, we’ll dive into ArcGIS Dashboards, the main pillars we used to organize and display statistics, and all the configurations we applied.

QuickCapture project is set up and web map is configured! After all that work, how can we show off our progress in a fun way?
This is where ArcGIS Dashboards comes in.

I’ve made a cool map, but I want to show more stats. How do I use ArcGIS Dashboards to create intuitive and interactive data visualizations on a single screen?

See Every Street dashboard tabs and elements

See Every Street dashboard tabs and elements

In the “Run, Walk, Have Fun” template solution, there is already a dashboard created that displays photos, total activities, and total distance.

“Run, Walk, Have Fun” template solution highlighting the Dashboard item

“Run, Walk, Have Fun” template solution highlighting the Dashboard item

While you can use the dashboard as is, we tailored ours to engage with our colleagues and to spur some friendly competition. We focused on the sense of accomplishment brought on by the heatmap, our collective distance covered as well as the number of submissions. As previously mentioned, this is all customizable and we encourage you to have fun and get creative.

All the elements we used leveraged the same underlying data – the “Routes” hosted feature layer view for the dashboard, created by the Quick Capture template. We previously listed all the content created by the template. Two layers are views; one has a pencil icon which qualifies it as “approved for public data collection”, the second does not. The second view is the one used by the dashboard. Outlined below are the elements we added and the parameters we chose to display the data. Again, this is how we did it, but is up to you to pick and choose what you’d like to convey to your end users.

Quick tips:

  • Select the ‘Add element’ button ('+' button)  followed by another ‘+’ button to add the element in the place of your choosing
  • You can organize your elements by creating tabs via the Layout button on the left. You can also group elements together. Hover over an element, hover over ‘…’, click and hold ‘Drag Item’, hold the ‘shift’ key, then drag it towards another element.
  • To review the configurations that have been set, hover over the top left corner of the element and select ‘Configure’ in the drop down.

The 'Configure' button in the drop down

If you wish to know exactly which elements and how we configured them, please read on. Let’s get started!

Since you’ve already done all the heavy lifting, e.g. heatmap symbology, in the Map Viewer, the Map element is left as is.

We wanted two main actions, one to see all the tracks recorded by our users, and two, filter by user to see exactly how many streets one person has covered. To do this, we filtered activities by participants with the following elements:

  1. a Sidebar
  2. two Category Selectors within it (a Participant selector & an Activity selector)

For the Participant category selector, select ‘Grouped values’ and categorize by the ‘Participant’ field.

Participant Category Selector data configuration

Participant Category Selector data configuration
 

For the Activity category selector, set to display all of the features by using the line-item template: {Activity}, {CreationDate}. Feel free to add other fields you’d like to display. Sort the activities by ‘CreationDate’.

Activity Category Selector data configuration

Activity Category Selector data configuration
 

To tie them together, assign an Action in the Participant category selector by filtering the Activity category selector. Check ‘Render only when filtered’.

Actions configuration within Participant category selector set to render Activity Selector only when filtered

Actions configuration within Participant category selector set to render Activity Selector only when filtered
 

As a side note, you may be interested to know, we previously had an activity like this one at Esri Canada that we ran in the summer. For that activity, we tried to stimulate competition around the maximum number of kilometers travelled. This was great for those hardcore folks, but we quickly found that cyclists had the upper hand while walkers or runners just could not compete. This time, we set a company goal that tallied our total kilometers, and the individual competition looked at the number of submissions, or the number of activities done by each individual. This has proven to be more engaging for all.

Now back to the dashboard configurations. While it’s fun to see what others have been up to by panning/zooming around the map, we also want to visualize our progress and how far we’ve travelled. Aside from the web map, the dashboard was organized to convey 4 levels of progress:

  1. Collective progress – a bar chart displaying our company challenge to travel the distance of Equator ~40,075km
  2. Total contribution – a series of elements displaying the number of submissions and types of activities submitted by everyone
  3. Monthly contribution – a bar chart showing the top participants who submitted the most activities that month
  4. Individual contribution – a series of elements showing a selected participant’s number, distance and types of activities submitted so far

See Every Street dashboard components – 1. Collective progress and 2. Total contribution

See Every Street dashboard components – 1. Collective progress and 2. Total contribution

See Every Street dashboard component – 3. Monthly contribution

See Every Street dashboard component – 3. Monthly contribution

See Every Street dashboard component – 4. Individual contribution

See Every Street dashboard component – 4. Individual contribution

Let’s deep dive into the specific dashboard elements and configurations that were used within each level.


1. Collective Progress:
Collective distance travelled: Add a Serial Chart to the bottom of the dashboard.  In the ‘Data’ tab, select Categories from ‘Fields’, select ‘Distance (km)’ as the Category field and select ‘Sum’ under Statistics. In the ‘Chart’ tab, select the orientation as ‘horizontal’. Once added, adjust the size of the element to allow more space for other elements.

Collective distance travelled serial chart configuration

Collective distance travelled serial chart configuration
 

2. Total Contribution:
Total activities submitted by participants: Add another horizontal Serial Chart. In ‘Data’ tab, select Categories from ‘Grouped values’ and categorize by the ‘Participant’ field to display total submitted activities per participant. Select ‘Count’ as the Statistic based on the ‘OBJECTID’ field. In the ‘Category axis’ tab, enable the ‘Scrollbar’ to efficiently display the Y axis as more people participate in the challenge.

Total activities submitted by participants serial chart configuration

Total activities submitted by participants serial chart configuration
 

Types of activities submitted: Add a Pie Chart element to the dashboard to see what types of activities your colleagues are up to. Choose categories from ‘Grouped values’ using the Category field ‘Activity’. Under Statistics, select ‘Count’ based on the ‘OBJECTID’ field.

Types of activities submitted pie chart configuration

Types of activities submitted pie chart configuration
 

Total Number of Records and Total Distance: As part of the “Run, Walk, Have Fun” template, Total Records and Total Distance Indicator elements have already been added by default. Since we deleted the filter expression in the Web Map (Map Viewer) in Part 2 , open the ‘Total Records’ Indicator’s Configure window, select the ‘General’ tab, click the ‘Edit’ next to Title and remove the text: “Last 24 hours”. Repeat these steps for the “Total Distance” indicator element.

Out of the box ‘Total Records’ Indicator configuration within the General tab

Out of the box ‘Total Records’ Indicator configuration within the General tab
 

3. Monthly Contribution:
Monthly Leaderboard: Add a 3rd horizontal Serial Chart and configure it to filter the expression: ‘CreationDate’ ‘is’ ‘This month’. Select ‘Grouped values’ and assign the Category field to ‘Participant’. Under ‘Statistics’, choose ‘Count’ as the statistic based on the ‘OBJECTID’ field. Sort by ‘Statistic’ field and select ‘Sort ascending’.

In the ‘Category axis’ tab, enable ‘Scrollbar’ to efficiently display the Y axis as more people participate in the challenge.

Monthly Leaderboard serial chart configuration

Monthly Leaderboard serial chart configuration
 

4. Individual Contribution:
Types of activities submitted by a participant: Add a 4th horizontal Serial Chart to show the different activities submitted by the individual. Select Categories from ‘Grouped values’ and Category field as ‘Activity’. The statistics is ‘Count’ based on the field ‘Activity’.

Types of activities submitted by a participant serial chart configuration

Types of activities submitted by a participant serial chart configuration

Duplicate ‘Total Records’ and ‘Total Distance’ Indicator elements by hovering over the top left corner of the element and selecting ‘Duplicate’ in the dropdown. Open the ‘Configure’ window of each Indicator element and add “Individual” as a prefix to the title.

To link all the individual elements to the Category Selectors, hop over to the Participant Category Selector configuration (top right corner of the Sidebar). Open ‘Actions’ tab, enable them to ‘Render only when filtered’ and map ‘Source field’: 'Participant' to ‘Target field’: 'Participant'.

Individual elements linked into actions within the Participant Category selector

Individual elements linked into actions within the Participant Category selector

If you have made it this far, we thank you for your attention and we hope your organization will enjoy this activity and its dashboard as much as we have. There is something very fulfilling about refreshing a map to see what new streets you have covered. The sense of accomplishment as a team has been a great motivator for many of us to get out even on the darkest winter days.

Any day where you get to go outside is a good day. If your organization creates a similar initiative using Esri products, please be sure to share them with us and everybody else. Extra motivation is always welcome.

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This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.

About the Author

Brittany Yu is a Geodata Support Consultant with Esri Canada's Support Services team. She provides support to clients who work with enterprise geodatabase components of Esri software. Brittany has a bachelor's degree in environment and sustainability from University of British Columbia and an advanced diploma in GIS from the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Her interest in GIS sparked from high school when her geography teacher introduced her to ArcMap 9.3. and ArcGIS Online.

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