Another piece of information that player may be interested in are the rates at which the resources are flowing _into_ and _out of_ the station. This information is made available through the "Economy statistics" option (it can even be used for internally produced wares). Such information is of great importance for player to figure out if an external resource is in higher demand than what the station is currently capable of importing, or if the exported products could be produced in higher amounts to satisfy the external demand.
While the "Economy statistics" is very useful for analysing the various trends of ware production and storage, and actually lets player get way more detailed picture of how a station is doing over time, the problem is that it is also fairly expressive, and more time-consuming to review. Player has to think about what the station is producing/consuming/importing/exporting, and make manual changes to selected wares and graphs. The graphs are also more time-consuming to review as opposed to simple numbers.
It would be nice if some kind of average import/export statistics were shown to the player as part of the existing expandable elements in the storage columns of the interface.
At its simplest, these averages would simply get calculated using the ware import/export (ware trades or transfers) information from the past hour. There could be some better ways to calculate them as well, but that would probably require a bit more detailed analysis by someone with background in statistics and better knowledge of internal game mechanics. Perhaps past two hours would be taken into the account for better representation, or the time boundary would be somewhat flexible - for example, take into the account last hour, but expand the time frame by 5 minutes if there was some major imports/exports happening during that time, then take into account additional 5 minutes once again etc (until hitting the hard 2-hour mark).
The averages would be shown to the player alongside "Production / h" and "Consumption / h" rates within the storage column entries. For example:
- Imports / h
- Exports / h
By exposing this type of information, player might be in better position to both quickly review if the station production is healthy/continous, to intervene prior to noticing that the input wares have run out, and to better plan expansion of miner subordinates.
P.S.
I am really not 100% sure on how the average rates should be calculated. This would probably require quite a bit of testing to figure out if the values are useful. In fact - it could also happen that the calculated values will not prove useful to the player at all, but at least it feels to me like this bit of information is always missing, particulalry when I look at the raw material levels.