The 2nd project of Data School 31 was to critique a visualisation that was used in a Makeover Monday project and then recreate it on Tableau. The visualisation I chose to re-design was based on a dataset that looked at the smartphone ownership rise in the US in pre-teens and teens. The original visualisation is linked here.
What were the positives about the visualisation?
Firstly, the value for each data point is labelled so you wouldn't have to look at the graph to make an estimate of what the data point is. In addition to that, the 2015 and 2019 lines are in different and distinct colours, which separates both lines quite well.
What were the negatives about the visualisation?
At first glance, having the chart as a line graph means it looks like a comparison between the trend of both years (i.e. as you get older, the more people use a smartphone in both years) rather than looking at the change between both 2015 and 2019. There are also some formatting issues such as the grid lines being very harsh on the eye and not having the 2019 as yellow text in the title. The latter would allow for the removal of the label on the graph.
What did my remake of the viz look like?
The main change was to make the chart a barbell chart so that the comparison between the 2015 and 2019 data is highlighted more clearly. There was also an addition of the tooltip to include a calculation that would showcase the positive or negative change for the percentage of smartphone ownership from the previous age group. Below is the final result of the re-designed visualisation.
