Makeover Monday presents a weekly opportunity for data enthusiasts around the world to deepen their visualization skills by engaging in a task which seeks to do a 'better' viz.
I was introduced to this through Andy Kriebel (Global Head Coach at the Data School) and I have been doing this for about 2 months now. However, I found out my approach to this learning task was deficient after a week of joining the Data School.
I seldom read the discussion behind the original viz. I never asked myself the question of the positives and negatives of the original viz and how I could make it better. I never considered my audience, what I am trying to address and how it is a build up to the original viz, and how my insights could help my audience make decisions. I never sketched my final work to have a preview of what I want to visualize at the end of my task. In the nutshell, my work just lacked planning with the only goal of producing something enticing to the eye and just developing my skills but that defeats the purpose of Makeover Monday; the purpose is actually to make it 'better' and that could be done by strategic planning.
My Tips:
- Read the discussion to get context
- Note down the positives and negatives of the original viz and what could be improved.
- Ask questions about the audience you want to address, what you want to address, and note how the area you seek to address can help your audience take action. This could be done through a user story which will be a topic for another day.
- Explore your data to select important columns.
- Make a chart selection based on the relevant columns of your data and the question you want to answer.
- Sketch a preview of what you want your final viz to look like.
- Create your sheet(s) and transform in to a dashboard and format.
- Publish viz on Tableau Public and share link on Twitter with #makeovermonday in order for your work to be reviewed by Eva Murray.
For further insights about making it better, check out this blog by Ruth Amarteifio (Data School Coach).
Read more about Makeover Monday here and make it a point to participate. Its a worthy task.