This week, our presentation task was to make improvements on the dashboard we used for our final interviews, using the skills we’ve garnered in the last fortnight.
The main feedback I received from my interview was to alter the design of my map, use a stacked bar to illuminate the fatality rates and to show incidence rates as a ranking rather than a tooltip. The feedback I received from my prior presentation was to consider the scope of the project on the whole in order to deliver with more confidence.
One important factor that the DS has imprinted on us in the last two weeks is to, whenever creating a dashboard, try to consider the user story in order to adjust and mould the dashboard with that narrative in mind. My initial dashboard was essentially an infographic giving general information on shark attacks in Australia. When rethinking it, I tried to frame the dashboard in terms of perceived vs actual risk. I added a question to my title, asking if we need to be concerned about shark attacks in order to fit a user story of someone who has a significant fear of sharks and wants to find out whether that fear is justified or irrational.
One thing I would like to add would be some supplementary data on leading causes of death in Australia, in order to illuminate the plethora of things more likely to kill you than sharks. This would have really cemented a holistic user story.
The first thing I worked on was my map, my initial one was as below:
The feedback I received was that using dots was not the correct choice here, as well as there being too much colour. I adjusted the mark type to density, and changed the colours around. I switched the filled map to greyscale, and used blue for the density dots in order to be consistent with my choice of blue representing the number of attacks throughout the dashboard.
After my presentation, Andy gave me some helpful feedback to format my map to remove the unnecessary backgrounds. My final map is as below:
This looks a lot cleaner and is easier to follow. On my initial map, I used tooltips to show the incidence rate. The reason I did this is because I had some whitespace on two of my states so the states didn’t match up when I joined my data. In my initial application, I just didn’t hover over those states. I rectified this issue and displayed the data on a bar chart in order to show the ranking.
Initially I didn’t use containers so formatting my dashboard was a complete nightmare. I rectified this and used containers this time around.
There were a few things I'd like to improve with my dashboard but struggled somewhat with time management, for example I think it would be interesting to try and show a fatality rate within my stacked bars vs population, but I wasn't sure how to do this. Next time I’ll ask on convo to get around this block.
Overall, this was a useful exercise in time management and general focus. The presentation itself went far better than the original, I stayed much calmer and was able to communicate the majority of what I intended to. Practicing my presentation undoubtedly aided this considerably.
My two dashboards are linked below:
Original:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/lucas.krokatsis/viz/sharkattacks_16617752415320/Dashboard1
New and improved:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/lucas.krokatsis/viz/sharkattacksv2/Dashboard2?publish=yes