Dana, a journalist, has been tasked with writing about her hometown, McMinnville, Oregon. She wanted to focus on UFO sightings because it is what her town is known for. The town even has annual events for UFO enthusiast gatherings. Dana wanted to post her article on a HTML page with a table of data to support her findings and have interactive filters to narrow down data for the reader/user. This project used JavaScript in order to filter UFO sighting data provided by Dana and upload the data to a user-friendly HTML page modified by Bootstrap.

This home page contains Dana's article and a table displaying sighting data.

The placeholder in each search box provides an example of the format for the user to input. The data should be entered as M/DD/YYYY and the city, state, country, and shape should be entered without capital letters.

The user can input one to five of the search criteria and hit enter. The table will then filter the data specified by the user.

Single-filter search results:

Double-filter search results:

Results from using all five filters:

This webpage provides a useful and simple way for users to search for specific data. The drawback of this website is the data is very limited. For example, the time period of data available is only available for January 2010. The limited criteria available should be explained to the user above the input box. Using the previous example, this could look like adding the phrase: 'Please enter a date from January 2010’ above the search bar. This would allow the user to have more guidelines on the type of data that is available for them to search for. In addition, I think further cleaning the data to make the interface more user friendly. For example, the cities and states are not capitalized which is not standard practice. Or to go a different route, the enter boxes could be changed to drop down menus of the types of data available in each column. This would prevent the user from having to guess what to enter, given that the data available is limited and specific to a certain time period.