Dashboard design is difficult. You have a hundred different options for every element of design (colors, fonts, chart types). If you aren’t a natural Bob Ross, it might not feel that fun either. Here are a dozen simple ways to improve the look and feel of your dashboards.
If you’ve ever received an image file and noticed the background isn’t transparent, it’s likely that has caused you a problem.
Want to learn the steps it takes to answer analytical questions build a dashboard like this? Check out the webinar recording above!
I grew up in the Issaquah/Sammamish area of Washington State about 30 (depending on traffic 60) minutes east Seattle. When I was growing up there in the 1990s and 2000s I remember hearing comments from a lot of people that, “this area has the highest amount of high school students per capita anywhere in the state.”
Most programs like Excel, Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server and Alteryx have a built in Date Difference (DATEDIFF) function. This function is great at letting you set a unit of measurement (i.e. year, month, day) and calculate the difference between a start and an end point.
6. Receive Feedback and Iterate
After you’ve built an initial dashboard, it’s time to get feedback from users and iterate. If your dashboards are going to be used by a wide audience, pick a few of the users you trust to give you feedback. Pick the people who will be frank and honest with you. This isn’t the time to get pats on the back. This is a chance to get constructive criticism so your product is as polished as it can possibly be.
Have you ever read a story about someone finding a meteorite? It probably contained a fantastic story about a smoking space rock careening across the sky, striking the Earth, creating a big, smoking crater and the finder being there to miraculously witness it all and dig it out. It then gets valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars and the finder walks away wealthier.
Imagine you are working on the following dashboard:
You’re pleased with where it’s at overall, but you’ve run into a dilemma. The dashboard helps answer the overall question “Where should we invest our marketing dollars?”, but it’s very hard to compare individual states. Maps are great for high-level geographic overviews but poor for comparing individual values.
Thank goodness! In Tableau Desktop 2018.3 Tableau officially released the “button object” for use in dashboards. Historically, you had to create a separate worksheet and go through a complicated process to connect multiple dashboard via navigation buttons. Not anymore!
Traditionally the set feature in Tableau is used to create a subset of predefined values. Those may be handpicked (i.e. How do these 5 products perform regionally?) or they may be chosen conditionally (i.e. Where are our top 100 customers by revenue located?). They are generally used to create predefined values you can filter on.
When you embark on a Tableau dashboarding project, you are creating a new product. When Apple releases the newest iPhone, they aren’t putting out a rough draft. They’ve done extensive user and product testing to make sure its the best product possible. You can (and should) use the same design sprint methodology on your own projects to ensure success.
When you embark on a Tableau dashboarding project, you are creating a new product. When Apple releases the newest iPhone, they aren’t putting out a rough draft. They’ve done extensive user and product testing to make sure its the best product possible. You can (and should) use the same design sprint methodology on your own projects to ensure success.
I was working with a client recently and needed to do find and replace in a Tableau calculation. While Tableau does have a native FIND() function, it just finds if a character string exists and tells you what position that string starts at. Not particularly helpful when it comes to replacing.
Preparing survey data for analysis in a data visualization tool is notoriously difficult. It's not as simple as being able to perform a single pivot or filter.
My grandparents have a beach house in Island County and every 4th of July there is a big parade and community get together. One of the events is the “Penny Hunt”. The adults scatter a bunch of coins (of varying denominations) in the sand for the kids to search for. As kids, my brother and I got fed up with blindly digging in the sand so we convinced our dad to get us a cheap metal detector. I remember pulling in $40 the first summer we put it to use. Not bad for a couple of kids.
A client recently challenged me with the question, “How could I show a bar chart in Tableau that shows values for the top 10 displayed as 10 individual bars but group all the rest of the values into a single bar called “other”…