YouthDataLab

YouthDataLab is the data platform powering Youthful Cities' research — a portal that makes youth insights across Canada accessible and actionable. The raw material: 7,000+ survey responses, 31,000 interview minutes, and 35,000 quantitative data points spanning 65 cities. The challenge was turning that into something a policy maker or researcher could actually use.

I built the frontend in React and Next.js, leveraging server-side rendering to cut page load times by 40% — meaningful for a data-heavy platform where users are stepping through dense visualisations and downloading reports. To keep the design consistent, I built an in-house UI component library in TypeScript that standardised accessibility and visual patterns across the product.

The data layer needed to handle both scale and recency. I built a serverless AWS infrastructure using Lambda and S3 to process survey responses at low latency, and automated ingestion scripts that pull in new community action research findings and push them live to the dashboards without manual intervention.

For the visualisations, I used D3.js for interactive charts and Mapbox for geospatial comparisons across cities — letting users explore youth attitudes on housing, employment, and education in ways that static reports can't.