Dashboard Week Day 2 - Find Hot, Single Potholes in your Area!

Day 2 of Dashboard week started with us being taught some important concepts around making dashboards more accessible. This included dealing with colour blindness, readibility, visibility and other issues that may affect people day to day.

Afterwards, we were tasked with building dashboards based on FixMyStreet data (Glasgow), whilst keeping accesibility at the forefront of our mind. As with other days this week, we had just 4 hours to build out dashboards.

The data itself was quite simple, with a single row for each issue, categorized as either pothole or pavement

Snapshot of the data provided

My plan was to build a dashboard that told you all the street issues in your area. For this I needed to bring in external postcode data for the Glasgow Area. I joined this on using a spatial intersect within Tableau.

Join the postcode data based on a buffer radius and the issue location

I actually chose to make the spatial points within Alteryx (using the create point tool) but this could also have been done in Tableau using MAKEPOINT() as we had Latitude and Longitude data.

My initial dashboard plan looked like this:

Tongue and cheek title, not present in final dashboard

The design had BANs at the top that highlight the key points, a map to show location of street issues and a table view as this can be read by a screen reader for the visually impaired.

My final dashboard followed the plan mostly, with a few slight deviations:

https://public.tableau.com/views/FindPotholesPavementIssuesinYourAreaGlasgow/Dashboard1?:language=en-US&publish=yes&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

Final Dashboard

Here are some of the accessibility decisions I made:

  1. Large font and muted map colours for visibility
  2. Colour & Shapes to differentiate issue types
  3. Table view for a screen reader
  4. Title with BANs - again a screen reader can dictate the important info
  5. Instructions under chart titles to tell user how to interact
  6. Dashboard allows for user to 'tab' if they can't use a mouse

Overall, happy with how this dashboard turned out. I got to try some new spatial techniques in Tableau and made a tool that can be used by many different people. I also got to practice making my dashboards more accessible.

Author:
Jacob Kilroy
Powered by The Information Lab
1st Floor, 25 Watling Street, London, EC4M 9BR
Subscribe
to our Newsletter
Get the lastest news about The Data School and application tips
Subscribe now
© 2025 The Information Lab