Statistical analyses are common practice in the modern world. While statistics is a discipline in its own right, statistical methods are employed across a vast and growing range of fields. It is, therefore, essential that the sharing of statistical information can be adapted to meet the needs of a range of audiences.
A web application (app) is an app that is accessed using a web browser. An advantage of web apps is their accessibility, allowing multiple users to access the same app from different locations, devices and software platforms. Shiny is a free, open-source R package for developing web apps. Shiny provides an excellent opportunity to share results from analyses with others in an interactive, easy-to-build web app.
A Shiny app contains a user interface (ui) and a server function. These two objects interact with each other to create an interactive Shiny app. The ui element controls the layout and appearance of your app whereas the server object performs the necessary computations. While Shiny dashboards can be built using the Shiny package alone, the Shinydashboard package can be used to make it much easier to create a more visually appealing dashboard. This package enables the use of complex dashboards with a variety of complex layouts.
While producing a web app in Shiny requires good knowledge of the R programming language, for those already conducting their analyses in R, Shiny offers the opportunity to create a bespoke, high-quality dashboard that is accessible to the end user.