Project: Improving one of my old vizzes.

by Amalia García-Vellido Santías

Hello all! I am Amalia, and I have recently joined the Data School as part of the DS22 Cohort :)  this is my first post and I will go through the project we did in the 4th week of pre-training.

Last week's project consisted of choosing one of our old vizzes and improving it using what we had learned in this first weeks of training.
Additionally, we had to find a relevant data source to add to the original in order to enrich the analysis using Alteryx or Prep for this first step.

I chose one of the first vizzes I published on my Tableau public profile as it has a lot of things to improve.

The viz to improve 

In terms of what we learned in DataViz 101

  • No title: At first glance is not easy to identify what the viz is about. It’s important to have an engaging title and subtitle.
  • Consistent formatting. I used different colours for the text, different font sizes and too much colour.
  • Remove gridlines and borders.
  • There is a label for each bar in the bar chart, it would be better to have just one for the maximum and another for the minimum.
  • The first part is comparing regions, and then as I focus on Spain, I excluded all the countries that are not in Europe, but I didn’t specify that.
  • It is difficult to follow the analysis and there are no insights.

Adding a new dataset.

The original dataset contained; regions, countries, life satisfaction and GDP/capita.
I decided I wanted to find a simple new dataset, so I looked for a dataset containing life expectancy and European countries.

Using Tableau Prep I cleaned the data, changed some data types, excluded all the regions except Europe in the original dataset, and joined both tables using “Country”.

Prep Flow

The granularity was not the same because the year field didn’t appear in the new dataset, so life expectancy is duplicated for all years.

This is what I achieved in 2 hours:

I didn’t have time to do everything that I wanted to, so I have worked on it in order to finish.

I changed  a bit more the formatting, edited the tooltips, modified grammar, highlighted Norway, and instead of using the size mark for life expectancy, I used a diverging color, to show the difference in life expectancy among countries. This is the final result:

Final Visualisation.

I really enjoyed this project and found it very useful as it was opportunity to use the knowledge acquired in the first weeks of pre-training.

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Amalia García-Vellido Santías

Fri 26 Mar 2021

Thu 25 Mar 2021