Quality Control Portal

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  portal home page

Inspiration

We all feel it — the slow decline of product quality, rising prices, and vanishing transparency across industries. From airlines to streaming services, everything seems to cost more while offering less. This trend, often called “enshitification,” inspired us to build a data-driven tool that quantifies how and where quality decay is happening — and gives people a way to push back with facts, not feelings.

⚙️ What It Does Quality Control Portal aggregates data from public government APIs — including the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), NHTSA (vehicle recalls), CPSC (product safety), and FTC (consumer complaints) — to track how corporations perform over time. It then uses AI-powered analysis to score sectors, companies, and services based on complaint volume, recall severity, and consumer sentiment, effectively producing a “decay index.” Users can:

View live dashboards by industry or company

See trends in consumer complaints and recalls

Identify the “worst offenders” per sector

Understand the why behind declining quality

🧩 How We Built It

Frontend: Next.js + React + Tailwind CSS for a fast, responsive UI

Backend: Node.js with API integrations for CFPB, NHTSA, CPSC, and FTC endpoints

Data Processing: Gemini models for clustering and scoring

Visualization: Recharts for dynamic data visualizations

Hosting: Deployed via Netlify for simplicity and reliability

🚧 Challenges I Ran Into

Parsing and cleaning large, inconsistent government datasets (government shutdown made things worse)

Handling rate limits and authentication for multiple APIs

Creating meaningful metrics that reflect real consumer harm

Designing a dashboard that remains accessible and easy to read despite complex data

Balancing humor, clarity, and credibility in my presentation of the concept

🏆 Accomplishments That I'm Proud Of

Successfully combined four major federal data sources into one cohesive portal

Built an intuitive, accessible dashboard using Tailwind and React

Created a prototype “decay index” that quantifies service degradation by category

Made a public-interest tool that’s both data-driven and socially relevant

📚 What I Learned

Open government APIs are powerful but messy — real-world data requires robust tinkering

AI models can help identify patterns in consumer harm when paired with structured data

Design systems (like CFPB’s own) can elevate public-interest tech projects

🚀 What’s Next for Quality decline Portal

Expanded Data Sources: Integrate OSHA, FAA, and FDA data for a broader view (if given more public data)

Predictive Insights: Train AI models to forecast degradation trends

Public API: Allow researchers and developers to add more data to this project

Community Contributions: Encourage crowdsourced data and transparency projects

Policy Partnerships: Collaborate with Companies to improve quality control and agencies to drive accountability

Built With

• gemini
• react
• recharts
• tailwindcss