Week 3

Week 3 of Data School was another Tableau training week. We were lucky enough to have the guest speaker, Caroline Beavon, come in and teach us a day long class on Infographics. Making a great infographic uses a lot of the same design principles as making a Tableau Dashboard.

My key takeaways from the class were:

• Think: Audience, Aim, Data
• Sketch EVERYTHING
• Keep it simple, clean and easy read

Project

The project this week was to pick a charity and then use infographic design process to create something in Tableau. I knew I wanted to choose a Parkinson’s related charity because my dad suffers from the disease, so finding a cure is imperative to me.  I did a bit of googling to see what was out there and I came across this infographic from the Michael J. Fox Foundation

This does an excellent job of conveying a lot of different information, but there is no real theme tieing the coloured boxes together and very little data.

Next, I found a chart showing the five stages of the disease from the Parkinson’s Disease Education Council that I thought I could replicate. But it turned out to be too difficult for me to get the text to wrap correctly in Tableau.

I tried to adjust my plan and find some icons to go along with descriptions of the different stages, but the ones I found from UCSB were too grim.

Eventually, I decided to work with a charity that I already knew incredibly well, Parkinson’s Unity Walk. I have been participating in the Parkinson’s Unity Walk (“PUW”) for over ten years. Every year my biggest bugbear is the donation website. The donation platform allows you to ‘customise’ your page, in reality, you can load one picture and change the default text. I have always felt that I could create a much better page.

AIM for my project is to redesign my donation website in Tableau. AUDIENCE is my potential donors, mostly friends and family. My DATA is my fundraising progress.

Dashboard