Hi, I'm Tjalf, an Information Technology and Design student from Germany. For my bachelor's thesis, I am designing an alternative web analytics dashboard that applies gamification concepts. The dashboard aims to make users feel more connected to their website visitors.
The rough concept is to visualise each unique visitor as an avatar with a randomly generated name on an interactive map, displaying their session information and several other details, to create a playful experience, such as greeting avatars when opening the dashboard.
While my thesis focuses on creating a UX and gamification concept, as a starting web developer, I am motivated to create a working prototype built on top of Plausible that could be used by others. However, due to my lack of experience, I need suggestions on the project structure:

The biggest issue is that I need a version of the session entries to make this work, and as far as my research goes, this is not possible with the plausible API. That brings me to two approaches I can think of.
One is to build a separate service to add to the Plausible CE Docker Compose that connects directly to the events_db via ORM. The other is to work directly with the Plausible Analytics source code and extend the React part as well as the Elixir backend API.

In my expectation, the ideal implementation just has a toggle button at the top area of each dashboard to switch between the classic Plausible dashboard and the gamified one, which might not be possible with the first approach. The second approach feels a lot more challenging, though, building on the existing Elixir codebase and might lack support of future releases of Plausible.

I am really happy for any suggestions or recommendations on how to proceed with my ideas :)