Earlier today I wrote about this great viz from Business Insider. In particular I really like the annotations.


I had a few minutes this morning so I decided to build a Tableau version. The first problem I ran into was getting the data in fiscal quarters. I couldn't find the data quickly, so I went with calendar quarter data that I found on Bare Figures. My data doesn't match the original above due to the calendaring, but that wasn't the point of the exercise. This was all about practice for me.

Essentially I wanted to replicate the viz with a more impactful title and some other minor formatting changes. Here's what I came up with. Click on the image for the interactive version.

The iPhone…what would I do without mine? We’ve become so dependent on our mobile phones and this is primarily due to the revolution that Steve Jobs launched back in 2007. This week for Makeover Monday, we look at this chart from DazeInfo:

What works well?

• Title captures your attention
• Nice highlighting of the declining bar in 2016
• Simple colors that work well
• Pretty simple, easy to understand viz

What could be improved?

• Beveled bars are unnecessary; just make them flat
• What does the * mean next to 2016?
• Is the axis needed if the bars are labeled?
• Inconsistent label formatting; make them all the same number of decimals
• Remove the gridlines

For my version, I wanted to focus on the story that was in the article itself. I was particularly struck by the percentage of revenue that the iPhone now accounts for in Apple’s overall revenue.

Week 41: Music was probably the easiest from a data collection perspective so far. In week 32, I tracked everything I listened to, so I didn't want to do that again. Inspired by Andy Cotgreave's great post about his music trends I thought I would do an analysis on the music that's in my iTunes playlist. I've never thought about looking at the type of music I listen to, how long songs are, nor the bands and their songs that I prefer, so this provided me with the perfect opportunity.

This time, I started my analysis in Vizable and after a few minutes I had a good feeling for the overall patterns in the data.

Having fun today using @VizableApp to understand my music data for #DearDataTwo Week 41 w/ @HighVizAbility pic.twitter.com/z23jE9Mcxl

— Andy Kriebel (@VizWizBI) January 21, 2016

Using Vizable this way definitely helped speed up my analysis in Tableau. I like how Vizable keeps me from overthinking the analysis. It encourages me to play rather than overdiagnose. That being what it is, I was quite surprised to learn how much alternative music I listen to. I suppose that goes back to when I was in college and that genre first became more popular.

I also had a playlist of the songs that are in my primary running playlist, so I used that throughout the analysis as well to help me see if what I listened to in general was the same music I listen to when I run.

For the final visualisation, I accidently created this radial pie chart thingy. I would never create something like this if it weren't for this project. I consider this more "data art" than data visualisation.


Click through the story below to see how I conducted my analysis and to see the postcard I created.

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