Want to dataviz better? Participate in #MakeoverMonday!

Recently, a friend told me she wants to learn Tableau. In addition to recommending DataCamp’s Tableau Fundamentals Skill Track, I suggested she start participating in #MakeoverMonday, a Tableau community project led by Andy Kriebel, whose tutorials and Watch Me Viz series of YouTube videos have helped me improve my dataviz skills in a way no class or book ever could. Each Sunday, Andy posts a data visualization and dataset on data.world, and dozens of Tableau enthusiasts and data analysts try to improve on the original visualization in some way. Sometimes, the charts are already very good, and I just put my own spin on them. Sometimes, they need a serious overhaul.

How does participation help you become a better data visualization designer?

1. You get the opportunity to work with “real world” datasets that are imperfect, like you would in a professional setting.
2. The amazing Tableau #datafam provides constructive, non-judgmental feedback if you ask for it. They are seriously the most supportive tech community on Twitter, and probably the whole Internet.
3. You build your portfolio. When I was looking for my current position, I was offered a different job as a Senior Tableau Developer solely based on the fact that the hiring manager liked a lot of the vizzes on my Tableau Public profile. He commented that he enjoyed my style — he said he looks at a lot of very boring vizzes — and that my vizzes represented the data well.
4. It’s a safe space to explore chart types and techniques you might not get a chance to create at work, then take those new skills and apply them.
5. It’s fun!

A Recent Example

For week 30 of 2021, we took a stab at making over Visual Capitalist’s chart, Visualizing the U.S. Population by Race, pictured below.

I didn’t find anything “wrong” with this viz, but I did think it was a bit cluttered and I didn’t care for the color scheme or star borders at the top and bottom.

Check out my remake below and view the interactive visualization on my Tableau Public profile.

I should also mention that there are many other community projects, too! I’ll write about a few of these in depth in the coming weeks. (Or months. Or years. It depends on how much freelance work I’m doing.) I’ll highlight just two here, but do check out this link for a more extensive list.

• Workout Wednesday, offered for both Tableau and Power BI, will challenge your technical skills and reveal where you need to improve. (I am still trying to make time for this one weekly.)
• As an analyst working primarily with healthcare data, #ProjectHealthViz, facilitated by the super talented Lindsay Betzendahl, is a personal favorite! I am working on the September challenge now. It’s an interesting dataset of some of the largest healthcare data breaches in history.

I hope this was a helpful tip that will propel you forward in your data visualization journey. I am always open to feedback, questions, comments, or folks just saying hi, so reach out!