So you’re building a pie chart, huh? You’ve ignored all the naysayers and pie chart haters and you’re going to build it anyways. Good for you!
All in Design
First off, let me give a huge shoutout to my colleague Klaudia for inspiring this post. She put together a dashboard format for a client we work for and I found it to look so sharp that I’ve adopted it for my own uses!
If you are looking for some inspiration for how you can make your Tableau business dashboards more visually intuitive, you’ll want to check this out! I walk through all the design steps in the video below.
Have you ever run into a situation in Tableau where you add labels to the ends of your lines, only to find out those labels are overlapping the lines and are borderline illegible?
Have you ever noticed how axes in Tableau worksheets are always at the bottom? That can feel counterintuitive to end users. They have to go all the way to the bottom of the worksheet and read the axes to determine what the worksheet is trying to communicate.
I was recently reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio (who founded one of the largest hedge funds in the world). He has an interesting mind and displayed a chart for visualizing data over time series, ranking values against each other. He mentioned that good thinkers are generally able to identify and visualize trends well. His chart looked something like this.
I provide summary tiles at the top of most dashboards I build to provide easy-to-find, bite-size information for my end users. There are a couple primary approaches to creating summary tiles in Tableau and a few tricks you can utilize to make them look crisp.
In Excel, you can easily highlight an entire row in a spreadsheet by selecting a row and adding fill to the background of the cells. How about Tableau however? Tableau highlight tables get you close, but one of their shortcoming is they don’t highlight the background of dimensional headers.
I recently received an email from a blog reader who was trying to solve a problem I’ve come across several times. He was representing populations on a map of the world in a chart that looked something like this.
I recently saw some visuals built in a non-Tableau data visualization tool (not sure which one) that were utilizing emojis in dimension labels. I thought it was a fun way to mix up the standard labeling and text tables we usually see.
Last week, I published a blog post about the power of compound interest and embedded related a Tableau Public dashboard (also below).
According to a number of questionable sources, Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.”
Progress toward a goal is a powerful way to motivate stakeholders toward achievements. Tableau is a great tool to help visualize progress toward a goal using reference lines, highlight tables, donut charts and custom images.
You’ve probably seen one of those graphs where a thermometer gets filled in to demonstrate progress toward a goal. They are popular on fundraising sites. It’s possible to create that same kind of visual in Tableau but requires a little ingenuity.
Great! You have now hosted a successful Design Sprint session and mocked up some whiteboards everyone feels good about building. What are the steps you can now take to ensure your groundwork results in Tableau dashboards that are used by your audience?
After doing an initial Design Sprint, we dig into most of our projects by hosting a whiteboard session. For more details about how to create a great environment for a successful whiteboard session, check out Kirk’s blog post from last week here.
“Just make a typical sales dashboard!”
I’m sure you have heard something similar to that. We sure have!
Or…”We have hundreds of great unused vizzes! What is wrong with these, why don’t they use them?”