As Domo’s director of knowledge insights, I get requested lots of questions on Domo merchandise. However, for no matter purpose, there’s one product function specifically that I get requested about essentially the most: DDX Bricks.
DDX Bricks are information app templates that help you create low-code apps irrespective of your technical expertise. However their enchantment extends far past that. In addition they are a good way so that you can add some wow issue to your visualizations—and, in flip, inform extra compelling information tales.
Take, for example, the DDX brick-powered map immediately under, which reveals the unfold of COVID-19 within the U.S. over time:
By having lots of pre-built bricks to select from, DDX Bricks additionally decrease the barrier to creating your individual information app. Choose the brick you need, join up the information, and voila!—you might have a functioning information story to inform.
If you wish to change or tweak some issues within the brick, that’s straightforward to do, too. Usually the code is commented with what completely different variables are, which makes altering them easy—even when you’re not acquainted with the language.
Working example: Once I created my first DDX brick across the Tokyo 2020 Summer time Olympics, I had no expertise with JavaScript. Nevertheless it didn’t matter; I had a pre-made brick that was straightforward to switch, so I may tweak issues such because the cycle time between modifications, the displayed date, and the cadence between date modifications.
However again to the COVID brick, which I created by modifying one other brick from the Domo Appstore. I hear rather a lot about animated maps displaying modifications over time, so I made a decision to create a brick that reveals precisely that, utilizing Covid case information over time displaying 7-day transferring averages:
As you may see, the map tells a fairly attention-grabbing story. Choose the metric you want to see (click on on the filter icon to point out the filter bar and choose the Vaccinations View), and it’ll dynamically change the properties of the visualization. The dates will change to solely embody the dates which have information for that metric. And the scales will change so that there’s a single scale for that metric for the entire timeframe of the information.
Taking part in via this map on the 2 completely different metrics is attention-grabbing. Once I take a look at the brand new case rely, I count on to see an enormous spike across the starting of COVID representing the primary wave. It doesn’t actually present up because the wave that got here via at first of 2022 dwarfs the first wave as compared. Maybe if I used a log-scale it might higher present the smaller waves.
Wanting on the variety of vaccinations, the largest wave was clearly to start with, with smaller waves displaying up later doubtless when boosters or different demographics grew to become eligible for the vaccines.
The group is at the moment engaged on changing these DDX Bricks displaying maps over time into templates that will probably be out there within the Domo Appstore. Once they’re accomplished, I’ll replace this submit, as properly. Total, the method of writing them was fairly easy, and allowed me to inform an information story in a means that I used to be not capable of do earlier than.
