I have been reworking a dashboard that I first created before I started at The Data School. It was my first ever use of Tableau and looked at house building in the UK between 1949 and 2025.
In my last blog post (which you can read here), I thought about potential user stories for this dashboard. After creating three options, I chose to focus on the following:
Government Policy Makers - Understand structural drivers of affordable housing shortages.
AS A Government housing policy maker
I WANT TO Analyse affordable housing completions alongside major policy interventions and funding changes
TO DISCOVER Whether policies are increasing the supply of affordable homes
SO I CAN Make evidence-based decisions about future housing strategy and investment
Now that I had my direction, I started planning charts for my dashboard that would offer clear insights:
- KPIS
- Percent change in houses being built
- Average household income
- Average house price
- Number of homes by year completed colours to show types of homes
- Show the housing trends over time
- Income vs housing price
- Show how prices have changed against avg household income
- Add labels for policy
- Changes in governments and policy over time
- Show comparison against new homes being built
Finally I put these ideas into a concept sketch:
Here I really saw the improvement that user stories and proper planning have on a creating insightful dashboards. Next I need to prepare my data so I can realise my sketch in Tableau!