Makeover Monday Week 19 2020

Today we were given one hour to complete a Makeover Monday during training. This involves critiquing a visualization and re-building it with the same data.

This week, I decided to document my thought process and highlight the steps I went through the project. 

This week’s Makeover Monday; 2020/W19: World Happiness Report 2020

Let’s start with the objectives outline in Makeover Monday; 

What works well

  • The hierarchy works well and you’re able to quickly see which order the rank is going
  • The country name and score is shown and organized in the same format
  • Clear title with year breakdown

What doesn’t work so well

  • The legend at the bottom isn’t that clear
  • The font, and representation of each country doesn’t stand out or is categorized
  • You can’t see ranking by different category

What would I like to do with it?

  • Create some form of comparative analysis whilst still showing the rank for each category independently.  

The audience

DS19 and our trainers over zoom – so a dashboard would be fine (mobile functionality not needed)

My plan

Have the dashboard in two sections. The top half for comparison and the bottom showing a map and ranked chart.

I then built the dashboard and created the parameters using a cheeky excel trick for the calculations (I added the fields after the ‘THEN’ by dragging them into the calculated field in Tableau);

Within the hour, and whilst writing up this blog this was the final product. This dashboard could be found here.

I wasn’t particularly proud of it and I didn’t have time to create and insert the rank table I wanted to. In addition, I would have used a more creative way to change the parameters (instead of having a plethora of drop down boxes). 

After the presentation the feedback was as follows;

  • The upper chart’s axis at zero makes the values hard to interpret and leaves a lot of dead space on the dashboard. 
  • What were the upper colors for -there was no colour key available (they denoted Region but I removed them as the legend was too large)

A note that was also raised during feedback was that we should always aim to show the dependent variable on the Y axis (which in this case would be the overall happiness score). 

Taking this into account, and after getting inspiration from my cohort’s dashboards (Shout-out to Hannah) I updated my dashboard; 

I prefer the use of colors, singular drop down actions and now feel like the whole concept is simplified and easier to interact with. A link to this dashboard is here.

Moral of the story – seek feedback, collaborate and iterate. 

Feel free to comment below, or contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter @vikb03.

Thanks for reading!

Author:
Vikash Bhardwaj
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