Question

I am creating a micro site that uses Javascript for data visualisation. I am working with a back-end developer who will pass me customer data to be displayed on the front end in order to graph and display different customer attributes (like age, sex, and total $ spent).

The problem I am having is that the developer is asking me what data I want and I have no idea what to tell them. I don’t know what I need to or want to request, in the past I have always just taken data or content and marked it up. It’s a new project for me and I am feeling a little bit out of my depth.

edit:

After thinking about this further and working a little bit with the back-end developer the specific problem I am having is how to do the actual ajax requests and update the results on my page. I know specifically that I am looking for things like age, sex, $ spend but I need to focus more on how to request them.

Answer 1

If you work with JavaScript, then the data format JavaScript understands natively is JSON. If they can provide you with data in JSON format, it would be a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Json

{
  "customers":
    [
      {
        "age": "23",
        "sex": "male",
        "dollars-spent": "7"
      },
      {
        "age": "22",
        "sex": "female",
        "dollars-spent": "10000"
      }
     ]
 }

I would guess you will need something like customer ID together with age and sex so that you could uniquely identify them.