Goal
The dashboard enables the IWH to professionally present macroeconomic forecasts from various institutions. In addition, the eoda empowerment enables the IWH team to maintain and further develop the dashboard independently.
Solution
Complete technical revision of the forecasting dashboard by eoda experts and knowledge transfer in practice-oriented training courses and workshops.
Result
The new dashboard combines an appealing design with high user-friendliness and visibly contributes to the competent public image of the IWH - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle.
Challenge
As one of the leading German economic institutes, the IWH - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle provides well-founded analyses and forecasts on economic development in Germany and Europe. Alongside public and political interest in economic forecasts, the demand for the presentation, accessibility and updatability of economic data is also increasing. Against this background, the IWH was faced with the challenge of fundamentally revising its existing forecast dashboard and adapting it to the growing requirements in terms of functionality, user-friendliness and technical maintainability. IWH not only wanted to modernize the dashboard, but also to be able to develop and operate it independently.
Goal
The aim of the project went far beyond a mere technical overhaul. The aim was to create a platform that:
- enable a professional and user-friendly presentation of macroeconomic forecasts from various institutions
- establish transparency and comparability between forecasts and visualize them attractively
In addition, the IWH team's expertise was to be strengthened to independently create and integrate new features in the future, update content themselves and maintain the platform autonomously.
Solution
The solution consisted of two closely interlinked components: the technical redevelopment on the one hand and targeted knowledge transfer on the other.
- Complete UI/UX overhaul with a focus on accessibility, design and user guidance
- Introduction of modern features: Newsletter registration option, modularization, simple social media sharing (LinkedIn, Bluesky - specially integrated, as, among others press representatives are part of the target group)
- Better organization of translations (German/English), optimized data structure for historical and real-time data as well as provision of raw data
An important part of eoda's offer is empowerment through knowledge transfer to the IWH team:
- An initial workshop was held before the start of the project to evaluate the team's needs and level of knowledge
- Training sessions were held on DevOps for Data Science, Git workflows, App deployment and Shiny architectures took place
- The IWH team was taught the ability to add new content independently, to further develop the dashboard independently and to correct errors themselves
"With the new dashboard, we have gained a modern and user-friendly tool for displaying our forecast data and created the technological basis for further developing our applications independently in future. We can highly recommend working with eoda! The entire project was characterized by high implementation quality and communication at eye level."
Dr. Katja Heinisch | Head of the Econometric Methods for Economic Forecasts and Simulations Research Group | IWH - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle
Result
The result is not only a more attractive and more user-friendly dashboard, but is also a real gain for the expertise and public image of the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle:
- A professional platform that is publicly viewable and meets the requirements of the media, academia and business
- Autonomous maintenance and further development: The IWH team is able to make changes independently and thus further develop the dashboard on its own
- Sustainable independence: Instead of dependence on external development, an internal build-up of expertise was made possible, which has once again significantly promoted internal innovation
- Positive feedback from user groups - the press in particular benefits from social sharing functions
Long-term impact: IWH has not only become a user of a solution, but a designer of its own digital infrastructure - empowered with and by eoda's solutions through joint communication at eye level.
“A web-based, interactive tool that is unique in that it provides both historical and current forecast figures published by various institutes as well as official data from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), including both initial publications (real-time data) and current values (pseudo-real-time years for the target years).”
Source: IWH - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle
The IWH Forecasting Dashboard can be found here
Get started now:
We look forward to exchanging ideas with you.
Your expert on Data-Science-Projects:
Lutz Mastmayer
projects@eoda.de
Tel. +49 561 87948-370
