What works well?

What I did

• Create a bar chart which displays the sub-category label on top of its bar
• Label all bars to the right of the maximum value in view
• Create a parameter that changes the display from a percent of total view to a raw order count view
• Create a progress shadow for every bar
• Show progress to 100% or progress to the maximum value depending on the parameter selection
• Only use one sheet
• Match formatting and colors
• Match tooltips

• The top section serves as a summary with the idea being to give a quick overview. 
• The bottom section (below the line) are all of the expense categories, which could obviously change based on what a company tracks. 
• I included BANs for the latest month and the change to prior month. 
• There's no budget, so the sparklines simply show the raw values.
• The mobile version only shows the summary section as I couldn't fit all of the expenses within the 4000 pixel height limit and really, who's going to scroll that far anyway?

VIDEO OF MOBILE VERSION

Maybe some love or Valentine's Day dataset for #makeovermonday week 7? We love data. It's our day too. @TriMyData @VizWizBI

— Staticum (@staticum) February 11, 2017

• Color choices that match the theme
• Simple title that tells me what I'm about to see
• Proper sourcing
• Nice description that include a question that explains what the viz is about
• Donut chart works well here as it's only 2 slices
• Clear labeling

In this week’s tip, I walk you through how I’ve learned to use Tableau 10’s Device Designer feature, which makes it so much easier to create device specific designs.

Note: I ramble a bit at some points in this video as I learn some things along the way and I also hit some wifi issues, so I apologize in advance. Hopefully this helps you see that no one is perfect and we’re all on this journey of learning Tableau together.

Click the image for the full-size version

Week 50 was clearly one of the easiest from a data collection perspective as there was really nothing to track. It was a nice break for the daily effort to keep up with each topic. For this week, I wanted to look at the apps that sit on my phone’s home screen.

• Why did I choose these apps?
  
• How do I organize them?
  
• What’s the most common colour?

Scroll through the story points below to see a bit more about my phone and get a bit of insight into how my brain works. The last two story points show the postcard I drew. It’s really hard to draw app icons! This took hours!

Today is my 9 year anniversary using Tableau. On April 11, 2007, I downloaded a trial of Tableau 3.0 and my life has never been the same. What better way to celebrate than working on Makeover Monday and creating my first mobile dashboard.

This week’s Makeover Monday was quite tough. How do you take a viz that’s already great and make it better? Or how do you tell the story differently? I wrote about this viz on my other site (DataVizDoneRight.com) a couple weeks ago. Here’s the viz again:

What works well?

• Title catches your attention
  
• Subtitle makes you more interested and sets up the story
• Very well organized
• Clear labeling of the headers
• Pictures of the faces make it feel more real
• Consistent use of colors makes it easy to understand and follow
• Nice totals on the right for context and they’re out of the way as to not distract
• Dark background works well and makes the bars pop out
• Great tooltips!
• Fantastic sorting interactivity
• Great spacing; there’s a lot of information yet it still feels simple

What could be be improved?

• Include a filter for gender
  
• Include more women
• Change the mark type for the ends

So given how good this is already and how little I saw that I could do to make it better, I thought I would use this week to practice making a mobile version, formatted for iPhone 6. I rarely create visualisations specifically for mobile and the only way to improve that ability is to practice.

Adding the filter for gender was easy. Including more women was out of scope.

Notice that I changed the ends of each bar to dots. I did this because I think the vertical bars are a bit tough to see; I wanted to make it easer for the viewer.

One challenge I had was that I wanted the sorting to be “touchable” like the gender filter is, but I couldn’t get it to work. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time fiddling with it, so I resorted to a parameter for the sorting.

I’d like to hear what you think about this mobile version. Does it work well? What could I do to make it better mobile experience?

A colleague sent me this presentation on The Future of Mobile by Henry Blodget, the CEO & Editor of Business Insider.  Since Mr. Blodget gave the presentation, I can only assume that he approved the content, charts and graphs, though I doubt he actually created them.

I’m incredibly disappointed and surprised that Mr. Blodget would put his name to this presentation.  Not only is he the CEO, but he’s the EDITOR too.  There are so many charts that communicate poorly that I stopped counting.  You’ll find area charts (lots of them), stacked bar charts, pie charts, etc.  He should be embarrassed.  He should know better as an editor.

Maybe if enough of us leave Mr. Blodget feedback on his blog post, then he and his company will finally begin producing good work.  Shouldn’t we expect more from such a reputable company?

Or maybe he should meet with the folks at The New York Times, who continually pump out high quality content.

A blog post from Nielsen says:

According to a new mobile video report from The Nielsen Company, the number of U.S. mobile subscribers watching video on their mobile devices rose more than 40 percent year-over-year in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010, ending the year at nearly 25 million people.

They presented their results with this table:

What’s wrong here?

1. Their summary says watching improved in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010, but why isn’t Q3 09 on the table?
2. Why do they include Q3 10 if they don’t include the quarter to quarter comparison?
3. The table is quite dark and dreary, with unnecessary color

I would reformat the table like this.

I have:

1. Added Q3 09 along with quarter over quarter comparisons (% diff on the right) and year over year comparisons (% diff at the bottom)
2. Removed any unnecessary color

While Nielsen’s report says “the number of U.S. mobile subscribers watching video on their mobile devices rose more than 40 percent year-over-year in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010”, they fail to point out that growth has actually slowed in 2010, both quarter over quarter and year over year.

Bottom line, be careful what you read.  I hope not, but Nielsen may have intentionally left out Q3 09 to paint a better picture.

I was walking through the airport after a long three days in Toronto and I was stopped dead in my track.  This caught my attention.  I had to catch my breath and wipe away the tears of sadness and frustration.

My first reaction was “OH NO!  They’re pimping 3D bar and pie charts as a way to monitor corporate security!”  Then I thought about it some more and laughed at the irony of two phrases in the advertisement:

1. “Defend your mobile life”
2. “Your business is vulnerable”

If you think about it, they’re 100% correct.  Your mobile business is vulnerable and you must defend its life against 3D bar charts and pie charts.  Stop the madness!