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:

If you’ve enjoyed these posts and want to continue reading my blog, please subscribe to my RSS feed or connect with me on Twitter (@acotgreave)

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.

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.

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

• Data Visualisation and Process
• Choosing the right colours for your visualisation
  • Emphasise the data
  • Use only one colour
• The role of text and visualisation design
  • Tooltips
  • Appropriate titles
  • Labels and annotations
• Should you add a border?
  • A short post on drawing marks on your Tableau views
• Less is more: improve clarity by removing borders and lines
• Designing a time series chart for seasonality
• Control your dates in Tableau dashboards
• Layout: the hardest and most important thing to get right
  • Chart type choice
  • Horizontal or vertical
  • Get feedback
• How to design an axis for maximum impact
  • Set the range and tick marks
  • Remove labels
  • Don’t always include zero
• Adding average reference lines
• Choosing the appropriate call to action to get people to interact
• Which action is best for interactivity?