I am building mass spec data reduction software in Python for a niche scientific instrument, and could use some advice on how to make my statistics look less amateurish. The target audience is mostly research scientists and graduate students.
First, I am using customtkinter/themed tkinter over standard tkinter as much as possible, which has significantly improved the looks of the software, however, the statistics panel is still something I'm struggling with.
I might want to migrate to PySide6 in the future, but for now, I'd really prefer to stick with ctk/ttk. Maybe this is the sunk cost fallacy, but I want to get my software working fully before breaking and rebuilding the GUI and I'm just getting the hang of ttk/ctk.
There are two statistics panels in the software, both on the left-hand side above the buttons:
raw data GUI
The above GUI shows the raw data for each analysis. The user can click on any datum to remove it as an outlier, and the statistics frame will automatically update. The colors of the data here have to match the colors in our mass spec interface software and can't be changed. The user can also click on any analysis in the right-hand list and view it directly, rather than using the Next/Previous buttons underneath the stats frame. The checkmark in the list next to each analysis name indicates that the analysis has been viewed and reduced, so analyses that haven't been viewed/reduced will appear with an empty checkbox.
quality control GUI
The above GUI shows all analyses in the sequence. The plots are a bit of a clusterfuck, but this intended for outlier identification and removal, so a clusterfuck is actually a good thing here. Like the previous plots, the user can click on a line to identify the analysis as an outlier and remove it from further calculations. The user can also hover their mouse over any given line to see the label/name given to the analysis. Lastly, the user has a button above the lower right hand plot to toggle between viewing 2 amu (hydrogen) and 40 amu (argon), both equally useless in 95% of scenarios. Note that the height of the statistics frame in this GUI is dynamic and based on the analysis types present, so I can't align it with the top of the buttons like with the previous stats frame. The colors here are flexible, unlike the previous plot.
Sequence selector GUI
The above GUI has no stats frame, but I'm throwing it in as a bonus in case people have any suggestions to make it look better.
I'm honestly pretty happy with most of the way the software looks, but like I said, I've been struggling with how to make the statistics frames look more professional. I'd be happy to take any general advice that anyone has, though!