The View Behind the Curtain: My Experience as a 2022 Iron Viz Judge
Back in January, I was offered a chance with a mixture of Tableau Ambassadors, Visionaries, and other community leaders to be an Iron Viz judge. Given the timeline for vizzing landing shortly after the winter holiday season and in the midst of a busy time at work, I knew this would be a great way for me to contribute to this annual tradition without the undertaking of developing and creating an entry. Now that the Top 10 finalists have been announced, I wanted to write about my experience as a judge and some key takeaways I saw from this year’s feeder. More specifically, I wanted to share my summarized thoughts on my critique approach and trends/elements I saw in the entries I gave highest scores to during my process. By no means was my approach identical to anyone else’s in the judging group, but I did often bring up questions of how to rate certain elements amongst my fellow judges to make sure we were all on the same page.
The process
Every Iron Viz judge was given a selection of the entries to review on a Tableau Online account and give scores. Vizzes had been made blind/authors’ names hidden from view on the dashboards. Based on the amount given and the time we had to judge (~4 weeks), we were off to the races. What originally I allocated around 2–3 hours a week to review batches in wee morning hours and post-toddler bedtime was the biggest underestimate of time * effort. Once it was pens down on March 11, I would estimate I spent something closer to 15 hours reviewing, tinkering, and tallying my scores. Fellow social ambassador, Karen Hinson, also has a similar experience of her time commitment with a previous Iron Viz judging panel, if you want to check it out here.
The biggest contributor to my ability to judge as blindly as possible was to mute Iron Viz tags on Twitter as soon as I had agreed to judge back in January. Yes, I definitely felt like I missed out on some of the excitement in my Twitter feed as the vizzes got published to Tableau Public but it also allowed me to not associate who did which viz. A small price to pay in the long run. There was only one viz I recognized in my batch but I was not able to identify the designer until after my judging was complete.
In my moleskine notebook, I created a set of bullets for my immediate thoughts on each viz as I went through judging before I entered the quantitative scores and any comments/suggestions I wished to share with the entrant. If I felt like there was an effort made on the entry and their was room for improvement on certain storytelling or design elements, I would enter that feedback into the comments sections for each category and/or overall feedback. For vizzes that I felt stood out as clear contenders that I would want to see on the Iron Viz stage, I would also explain why I gave them high scores.
Trends I Saw this Year (aka Things I’d like to Apply to my own Work)
Iron Viz standards have gotten increasingly higher with every passing year and 2022 is a step in this direction. With that perspective in mind, I like to think of Iron Viz as the “haute couture” of data visualization competitions. For many of us in our day-to-day jobs we need that utilitarian and practical design mindset in our dashboard work because of the audience (analysts, c-suite execs, politicians, the general public). However, like any good data designer, I love to get inspired and steal like an artist from those that do it best. So think of these trends as the elements I would like to incorporate into my “Ready to Wear” data viz products.
- Horizontal long-form layouts: Rather than the vertical “ scrollytelling” many of us have seen year after year, I started to see more left to right scrolling vizzes this year. It reminded me more of reading digital magazines/books which I can appreciate for the amount of time I stare at screens all day, because, job.
- Accessible color palettes: I saw several entries that looked like they paid attention to color-blindness with a selective palette and documented their color palette resources in the documentation caption. Many of these had a soft, almost pastel color scheme. IMHO we should be encouraging more accessible elements in the design criteria as this is the best way for our discipline to grow and mature.
- Choose Your Own Adventure-Style: A number of the Top 10 finalists had incorporated this filter/parameter mix to change the way the information was shown to the user. I have seen this self-reflective data viz storytelling many times in data journalism pieces especially with sections or filters that allow the information to be shown that is representative of the locality/SES/demographics of the end user. This technique definitely takes advantage of Tableau’s parameter functions so the idea of scenario-building also has lots of potential for business use cases.
- Attention to the smallest details: I saw a lot of carefully formatted tooltips, text objects, and floating banners/sectioning this year. In fact, some entries had selectively turned tooltips off! If the feature does not work for the story you are trying to tell, you do not need to use it. Design with purpose and no corner is too small to fiddle with when it comes to utilizing dashboard real estate. Every pixel matters.
Final Thoughts
I am really glad I had the chance to sit on the other side of Iron Viz this year as a judge. It gives you a renewed perspective of what it takes to win and to experiment with new ideas and techniques. I’m not 100% sure I will do it again next year (based on timing/other commitments), but I would really encourage other women in the community to do it at least one time. At a minimum, my hope is to be involved with Iron Viz feedback sessions in 2023 so I can circle back as much of this knowledge to a larger group of hopeful entrants.