For day two of dashboard week we were given several datasets looking at cat behavior and movement across four different countries. Our project brief had plenty of freedom within it, asking for an analysis or infographic of our choice.
I started by looking at the data and I could see we had two tables for each country, one containing events measured by the GPS tags and another giving information about the cats associated with those events. I input both UK related tables into Tableau Prep and noticed that there were a few fields that were going to need some cleaning. Most the fields could be cleaned using custom splits and the removal of letters/punctuation and once this was done I removed any unnecessary fields. I joined both UK tables together using the animal IDs and tag IDs and began to look at the data form the other countries. Although the data looked fairly consistent between the different countries I did notice some variation in fields and decided to only use the UK data. The UK data seemed to have enough information to create an insightful visualization and I didn’t want to spend too long on the data prep.
I then began designing my dashboard. I decided to stick to an interactive analysis as I thought the range of fields regarding cat behavior would lend itself well to exploring and finding trends. I sketched out a rough plan on excalidraw and began building. I had issues with the geometric data but managed to join the various event points together in oder based on the timestamp within each event. In the end I was able build everything that I had planned however I struggled to build anything additional that added any insight despite having the time.
Overall I was happy to create a finished dashboard that was exploratory and visually decent. However, I was disappointed that I couldn’t find some more interesting insights. I spent a great deal of time trying to find an interesting angle to the data but struggled to really find one. In the end I created the most insightful charts that I could and provided a dashboard that was more of an overall analysis than telling a specific story. Tomorrow I will try to be more decisive with a specific story and reduce the scope from a general analysis.