Back to Home
Data Visualisation
The Issue ~
Overview
Short term absences such as unexpected illness account for 90% of all absences.
With the 4 main contributors being asthma, hay fever, cold and flu and Sick Building Syndrome.
Roughly 30% of a department’s average maintenance budget is wasted on poor, counter intuitive, or unnecessary maintenance practices.
Approach
Qwota fits in by directly addressing vital losses in budget and company spending.
It assists their facilities managers with operations such as Budget Management, maintaining Employee Wellbeing, making Directive Actions, promoting Better Communication during quarterly and yearly reviews.
What did I learn?
Qwota was developed using a years worth of Indoor Environmental Quality data from an office in Sydney. During my exploration of this dataset, I learnt that there was a significant relationship between environmental incidents and season changes on poor indoor environment quality.
This of which impacted the rate of sick leave taken during different periods of the year.
Ideation ~
I began by ideating how to visualise the data in a way that communicates areas of interest specific to how it can impact the likelihood of short term sickness. Each combination of risk factors (temp, humidity, pollutants and airspeed) outside of its ideal range would increase office vulnerabilities.
Hence, highlighting these deviations from the ideal range became the key indicator of risk levels.
From here I used my key goals (below) to formulate my first iteration ->
End to End Insights
Actionable Suggestions
Assessable Outcomes
Comprehensible Data
Visually Tidy & Concise
Clear Goals & Intentions
After a few more iterations, the prototype was tested using the Think Aloud Protocol with 11 different participants. Participants were tasked to explore the product and deliver predetermined insights as a means to test the Learnability, Efficiency and Memorability of the solution
SUS
Average Test Time
m
s
Completion Rate
%
Error Rate
%
Product Breakdown ~
Each section of Qwota focusses on the end to end responses needed to assist a facilities manager on both short and long term maintenance.
With quarterly data visually showing areas of interest and importance, the budget monitor shows direct progress from the previous year and yearly data shows the relationship between sick day data and each of the variables measured.
The next actions panel offers the facilities manager some suggestions on actions to take during the quarter that directly addresses the factors that have the highest variances from the healthy range.
My Solution ~
Qwota is a web based dashboard that allows facilities managers to accurately view and act upon vulnerabilities in the office environment. These vulnerabilities show up as seasonal and environmental changes that propagate into the workspace, causing abnormal influxes of short term illness that contribute heavily to employee absenteeism due to sick leave, and budget losses.
To view my Dashboard, please follow the link provided below: (Desktop Required)
View Qwota Here
Sarah Samarasinghe
Sydney 2025