Project 1 is in the books, so let’s take a quick look back are review 3 of the beautiful vizzes created from the Tableau Accelerator available on the Tableau Exchange.
Using the above viz as our canvas, there are a few things that stick out as “have to fix” from the best practices standpoint.
–BAN Alignment – the idea is cool to have the BAN on top of a trend/spark chart, but the execution is lackluster.
–The color usage in general feels overdone.
–the overall data-to-ink ratio is off.
So, without changing the structure at all, here is where I landed in my efforts to clean it up.
The things I did include pulling apart the BAN/Chart combos. This brings the alignment of the BANS together and makes it less hostile to read. I dropped all the unneeded colors, and focused on highlighting values that didn’t meet the target, or were negative. I also stuck to just bar charts rather than doing all the different variations of the same thing. These minor changes, to me, make a huge impact on the readability of the dashboard, and there is a definite reduction in the cognitive load.
The community went big, making them not only more functional but amazingly beautiful!
The first one I want to look at was Dorian Banutoiu‘s submission, which he built for use on a large format TV screen for the entire call center to see. First, awesome use-case! Having dashboards consumable for large audiences at one time is a great way to convey information to the team.
Dorian broke the dashboard down and focused on the most important KPIs, and did a bit of gamification with the “Top Agents” list. The color palette is simple and effective, but I did happen to run it through the Spectrum Chrome Extension, and for the most common color vision deficiency those users might have some problems seeing the different indicators.
The next submission for review is from Zainab Ayodimeji. Zainab took a three-view approach giving us a beautiful overview and then complimenting that with details about the Agents and the Customers.
The first thing that struck me with this dashboard was the color palette. Purple/Orange is a really nice complementary set of colors. The orange-as-the-highlight on the Year over Year change is so effective, and the sequential purple on the heat map makes it really easy to see the hot spots. The reason for a sequential color palette here versus a diverging is due to the lack of a natural center point. In this chart, we are concerned with the “hot spots” and had we colored both ends (the highs and lows) it would make it much more difficult to see those spots.
The other really slick thing she built into the Customer View… check it out!
That is a super-effective way to allow the user to drill down and see a quick focused view of the customer. BRAVO!
The last one comes from Autumn Battani who pulled off some data viz sorcery with her dashboard! The most striking thing was that she used no color whatsoever! It reminded me instantly of Shine Pulikathara’s IronViz winning dashboard which also followed the “Newspaper” style. Autumn then turned it up to 11 with some of the cool features she built in…
The first to check out are the cards on the lower right section that you can click through to see the specific customer metrics. The second thing that absolutely blew my mind was on the agent screen where you can select the agent to “Freeze” at the top, and change the sorting for the agents below for super easy comparison with ranking. The show/hide sorting boxes are also a really nice and clean touch adding to the overall aesthetic of the dashboard. The third thing she did was not only allow us to flip between the metric we want, but we could also change the rows and columns allowing the user to make this super personal for them.
The second project of #RWFD Season 2 is something that we might all be starting to look at soon as the world starts to move again; SAP Concur. Check out the accelerator here for reporting on Employee Expenses.
Thank you all for continuing to participate, share and comment on #RWFD!