Makeover Monday, One Week In | DS23

Having completed our first week of Alteryx-focused tasks and challenges, Week 2 saw my DS23 cohort move back to the application we have grown to love - Tableau.

Having had a day of talking through the foundations for visualisation techniques, the final two hours of the day were devoted to tackling this week's Makeover Monday challenge, a staple for prospective Data School applicants. However, I am normally someone who takes a significant amount of time to complete such a task, getting bogged down on meticulous details and making sure everything lines up perfectly.

Today, I decided to approach things differently: I gave myself only an hour to plan, sketch and produce the viz, dealing with everything apart from formatting (which I allowed myself a few minutes afterwards to tweak).

An example of the fun data - sports suits me

My dataset - referee foul-calling statistics from the NBA - was fairly hefty, so I had decided early on I was aiming for a trellis-esque chart, possibly utilising a scatter plot with points for each of the referees. This would give me the ability to pick and choose the foul metrics I would use, but also stopped me from excluding or prioritising certain referees in the data. I had also decided to show on which sides of the "average" call frequencies these referees fell; given my time restraint, I didn't have time to formulate fields to do this on a single line, so instead used a scatter plot in conjunction with a trend line, colouring the referees depending on which side of said line they fell.

The final product
The end product!

Running out of time (and patience with my own work), I moved onto arranging these worksheets into the final dashboard. This wouldn't normally concern me too greatly, but I am trying to get into the habit of using containers more effectively, rather than succumbing to the constraints of automatic tiling. With seconds to spare, I was vaguely happy with what I had produced, and spent a few minutes afterwards doing the bare minimum formatting.

Author:
Harry Osborne
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