After a week-long case study of Survivor data, Data School New York applicants for cohort 3 submitted their final application dashboards earlier this week! Before the deadline, I organized office hours for friends applying to the Data School. As I worked with them to improve their submissions, I noticed some common areas of improvement:
📄 TEXT
Choose your words wisely. Guide the narrative through headings and/or subheadings and if you wish, emphasize key findings in writing. However, minimize text so your charts can speak for themselves. Also, you will be presenting this dashboard to at least one interviewer; the text you want to include in your dashboard can be your script instead!
🖼️ PADDING
Give the elements of your dashboard room to breathe! In the Layout pane of your dashboard, you can play with padding to create space in your dashboard. If you’re having trouble with padding, this is not best practice but you can add Blank objects to construct a similar look.
🎨 COLOR
Use color strategically throughout your viz. Select your main color and highlight color(s) – then stick to it! For example, if the greatest value of a bar chart is highlighted in teal, avoid using the same teal or a similar teal to represent something else, like an age group, in another chart.
💬 TOOLTIPS
I often clean up the tooltips last, unless I intend on inserting a viz in tooltip. Nevertheless, changing your tooltip from Tableau’s default is a small win that shows effort. If you have time after designing your dashboard, go into the tooltips and edit them!
👆 INTERACTIVITY
Add dashboard actions, like filter or highlight actions, for an impactful user experience – interactivity is both fun and functional! Ensure they work as planned and similarly, consider what you will do if the interactivity lags during your presentation.
For anyone applying to the Data School, be mindful of the elements above and best wishes in your application process! ✨