Today we were given one hour to complete a Makeover Monday during training. This involves critiquing a visualization and re-building it with the same data.
This week, I decided to document my thought process and highlight the steps I went through the project.
This week’s Makeover Monday; 2020/W19: World Happiness Report 2020
Let’s start with the objectives outline in Makeover Monday;
What works well
- The hierarchy works well and you’re able to quickly see which order the rank is going
- The country name and score is shown and organized in the same format
- Clear title with year breakdown
What doesn’t work so well
- The legend at the bottom isn’t that clear
- The font, and representation of each country doesn’t stand out or is categorized
- You can’t see ranking by different category
What would I like to do with it?
- Create some form of comparative analysis whilst still showing the rank for each category independently.
The audience
DS19 and our trainers over zoom – so a dashboard would be fine (mobile functionality not needed)
My plan
Have the dashboard in two sections. The top half for comparison and the bottom showing a map and ranked chart.
I then built the dashboard and created the parameters using a cheeky excel trick for the calculations (I added the fields after the ‘THEN’ by dragging them into the calculated field in Tableau);
Within the hour, and whilst writing up this blog this was the final product. This dashboard could be found here.
I wasn’t particularly proud of it and I didn’t have time to create and insert the rank table I wanted to. In addition, I would have used a more creative way to change the parameters (instead of having a plethora of drop down boxes).
After the presentation the feedback was as follows;
- The upper chart’s axis at zero makes the values hard to interpret and leaves a lot of dead space on the dashboard.
- What were the upper colors for -there was no colour key available (they denoted Region but I removed them as the legend was too large)
A note that was also raised during feedback was that we should always aim to show the dependent variable on the Y axis (which in this case would be the overall happiness score).
Taking this into account, and after getting inspiration from my cohort’s dashboards (Shout-out to Hannah) I updated my dashboard;
I prefer the use of colors, singular drop down actions and now feel like the whole concept is simplified and easier to interact with. A link to this dashboard is here.
Moral of the story – seek feedback, collaborate and iterate.
Feel free to comment below, or contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter @vikb03.
Thanks for reading!
