Re-Viz-iting your dashboards in Tableau Public
Recently, I presented how useful it can be to reviz your work after I entered the #IronQuest initiative on revizzing your work.
The benefits of reflecting on your work.
It is a really great way to practice new or existing skills.
- You will have picked up a lot across your time learning Tableau if you have been using it for a while. Your Tableau public profile is a repository marking all that you have learned. For me, it was the fact that I have learned to use space in a more effective way and design to enhance the findings of my data.
- If you are new to Tableau, often the hardest part is finding decent data to work with. A lot of dashboards are downloadable, and you can reverse engineer and tailor a viz to your interpretation. Just please do give the appropriate credit to the person where possible, and in any case, ask them first.
Measuring Growth and Learning
- It’s definitely useful as something to measure growth and learning. You will notice in my examples how different they are and what my focus was.
- Please don’t ever delete any of your old work. It is so valuable.
- Personally, I think that this is a great way to demonstrate your growth in a data role. It shows how active you are in reflecting on your own work which is a great skill to have, as well as how much you have learned.
- You can certainly grow your portfolio and tableau public with this.
Maybe you lack inspiration?
- As I said before, I was going through a period where I lacked time, but still wanted to make something. I didn’t know what. Knowing I had the data, and most of my charts and content built out made it easy for me to pick up a quick data visualisation project.
- Despite the data prep being done, you can if you want to go the extra length, find supplementary data to your topic and see how you can improve your analysis too.
Pick what you want to improve on.
- Is it design, storytelling, charts, context or even supplementary data?
- Don’t go overboard in trying to improve everything at once.
- I find that when you start out learning Tableau, you can get really excited (or at least I did) and want to present your data in several ways at once. Reflecting on my old work, I learned very quickly to summarise my many charts and improve on my storytelling.
My before:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/alishadhillon/viz/ExploringtheChangingForests/Dashboard2
After:
- Storytelling: I decided to tell my story in a more logical manner.
- My viz starts from a high level and then breaks the information down.
- I have my high-level KPIs that look at the trend overall in all 3 areas.
- The viz filters across the three areas.
- This then looks at it from a country level, down to a regional level.
- I supplemented it with extra data to query my findings.
- I made it vertical, using space to allow for breathing room.
- I used more subtle colours.
My before:
My after:
- Storytelling: Again, I decided that this flowed better as a horizontal viz, I just needed to give it space to breathe.
- I started by breaking this down into When, How, Why, What, Where
- The charts are the same, but the colours have changed to meet my newspaper-style layout.
- I’ve condensed my charts down to clarify my story.
- It's a lot less compact making it easy to follow along.
Summary
A lot of us are busy with our day-to-day lives but revisiting something old doesn’t take a lot of time and can really benefit you. If you want to use the data that I have and build on my work to see how you can improve, deconstruct and learn, that is also fine! Of course, give adequate credit to who inspires you where possible. I hope that this is the motivation you need to go and viz.
Happy vizzing!
