Data Common

This project is a continuation of work initiated in the previous semester to analyze and improve data visualizations for Housing Navigator Massachusetts’s website, with a focus on understanding how users engage with the affordable housing search engine and property listings on housingma.org. Building on an existing analytics and dashboarding foundation, this semester’s work will deepen, refine, and extend prior analyses rather than starting from scratch. In the previous phase, student teams used Google Analytics (GA4) and Looker Studio to explore high-level user engagement patterns across the platform. Initial findings surfaced meaningful differences in usage by weekday vs. weekend, hour of day, and device type, and helped identify opportunities to improve clarity and usefulness of existing dashboards. During the Spring 2026 semester, the project will focus on enhancing and operationalizing these insights to better support Housing Navigator’s internal decision-making and external reporting needs. Key areas of emphasis include refining geography-based analyses (e.g., districts, regions, or planning areas within Massachusetts), improving dashboard filters and usability, and extending analysis of internal publishing activity now that readable organization- and role-level identifiers are available.