How to build a dashboard from a big dataset in a few hours?

One of the toughest tasks during the 4-month data school training is Dashboard Week. You are supposed to build a dashboard in 5 to 6 hours and then present it to all attendees. But the question is, how do you find your niche from a big dataset in that limited time?

We usually deep dive into client projects during the last few weeks, but during Dashboard Week, it's not possible to explore and understand all the fields and their deep relationships. Here are some steps that will help you create a good MVP at the end of the day:

Step 1: Find your interest or some simple questions that you may have from the dataset. Our task this week was to work on movie data. It was a huge dataset, and it was difficult to understand it or the relationships between the variables. However, I was interested in the movie 'Interstellar' by Christopher Nolan, so I decided to focus just on this director.

Step 2: First, try to build one or two strong visualizations and then create some supportive visualizations relevant to them to strengthen your dashboard.

Step 3: Do not focus on complicated calculations or visualizations that you haven't tried before. In some cases, it might make sense, but overall, if you can't implement it, you'll lose time and struggle with troubleshooting the calculation or the chart.

Step 4: Before building the dashboard, look at similar topics on Tableau Public or some dashboard photos on Pinterest. This will help you get quick ideas for your dashboard.

link to the dashboard

Author:
Sayd Abdul Tawab Hussainy
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