Dashboard Week - Day 2!

by Christopher Marland

Today, we blew up the internet. The task was to download and analyse Google’s Copyright Violations data – and boy was it big!

We ended up having to sync our efforts and Collin downloaded the data whilst we went in search of USBs with which to distribute it.

Once we had the data, there didn’t seem to be, I thought, much prep necessary in Alteryx, and so I decided to skip Alteryx and make a pretty simple union in Tableau.

This might have been a mistake since Tableau took considerably longer than Alteryx might have, especially when it came to filtering the data (to hopefully make it faster).

It took 30 minutes!!!

Given that I had way more time than I wanted, I decided to sketch out a dashboard early (and write part of this blog). Normally, my process is to build some initial charts, throw them into a rudimentary dashboard, then when I see all the data together I eye-out analytical gaps and then start thinking about ways to fill them – make more graphs, throw them into a second dashboard draft, and then start to think about how to make the dashboard look a little sexier.

Nonetheless, I had to change my process a little bit today. I saw this dashboard online when looking for a colour scheme and thought I’d adapt it a bit to what I was trying to do.

Courtesy of Data Pine, check out their work here

Eventually, I went ahead and found myself deviating hugely from my design for two reasons:

  1. In creating my parameter drop-down, I realised that I could also show some proportions, which scaled down the amount of space I needed to use on my dashboard.

  2. I also realised that a scatterplot can demonstrate part-to-whole in some circumstances and that rid my need to create a separate chart for that purpose.

However, this meant that I was kind of lost and didn’t really know what else I could do – eventually, I ended up scouring through my Tableau workbooks for ideas, and I landed on doing a running total chart because I thought there was a lot of potential for change in who was amassing the most number of URLs removed (and I was right!)

Anyhow, here is my finished product, I’m rather proud!

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Christopher Marland

Fri 10 Jan 2020

Thu 09 Jan 2020

Wed 08 Jan 2020