Tableau Design Month, post 12 of 12: the big recap

Over the past month, I’ve deconstructed a dashboard I made for Tableau’s internal VizWhiz competition. Below is an attempt to quantify the Impact and Difficulty of each of the design choices I made. You can click on each one to go read the post describing the design choice:

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Why did I bother changing a dashboard that looked pretty fine in the first place? Why did I write 14 posts about this single dashboard?

Simple: I wanted to really think about the design choices and share the process of taking a perfectly functional dashboard and trying to make it into a thing of beauty.

The original (top) to the final result (bottom)
The original (top) to the final result (bottom)

Stepping back made me realise how many and what type of choices I make. Each choice has a highor low impact and is easy or hard. I quantified that in the viz above. As Michael Mixon pointed out in a comment, as we become experts we take this stuff for granted.

Take note: my posts are not a manifesto for all visualisations. As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s no right answer when designing visualisations.

I recommend you download the final workbook. There’s lots of extra views that didn’t make the final version. You’ll be able to see for yourself how I did everything.

Note the vertical lines
The end result

For reference, here’s the full list of posts:

Which design features should I implement
Click the image to see an interactive version

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