I want to start off by saying, I am super excited to join the RWFD team. I love this initiative, and I think it is important to have a place to share work that is normally confidential and to have a place to practice skills and build a portfolio that is applicable to real-world business scenarios. So, thank you for having me, Mark!
For Session 2, the goal was to build a Financial Summary dashboard. The requirements for this dashboard were deceptively tough. We needed a summary of all financials, and a deep dive into the balance sheet and income statement. This is a lot of information to capture in one dashboard, and for the user to consume. For better or worse is not uncommon to get a request for a one-stop shop summary dashboard, and they can easily get busy and hard to use. Financial data can also be tough if you’re not familiar with it. And for folks who are familiar with it, it can be difficult to break out of recreating balance sheets from Excel. So, great job to the folks who created a dashboard for this session.
There are two dashboards that I want to highlight.
I found Varun’s Financial Overview Dashboard to be well thought out. The attention to the user experience stands out. Varun managed to fit a lot of information on the main dashboard without feeling overwhelming or crowded.
There are several things that I think work well here:
- Helper text – The numbers, headings, and helper text help orient the viewer quickly and the data does not feel intimidating
- Interactivity – I don’t often create custom buttons for filters and navigation, but I think the app-like feel is quite nice here and makes it feel cohesive, and could go a long way with a business user who is not familiar with Tableau, such as users who are moving away from Excel reporting. The caution here would be that custom layouts and buttons require maintenance, and may be inconsistent with other dashboards in a business environment. The attention to detail in the tooltips is nice
- Organization – There are clear and sensible sections, with visuals that convey the most important information. The color choice works well for calling attention to the right areas.
- I appreciate the white space and use of sparklines and spark bars to pack a lot of information in, but the larger charts would benefit from displaying the axis where there are no mark labels. Overall, the design is light and clean, and the visuals work well.
Jyoti’s Financial Cockpit Dashboard was also a light, clean design where the information is nicely organized. A lot of the comments I made about Varun’s dashboard also apply here. Well thought out, and nicely designed.
- KPIs – The KPIs are the focal point at the top of the dashboard, with the key information to compare to the prior year and show the positive or negative change. I think the font could be a little darker and larger in this section, but I like the information that was included.
- The waterfall charts are an interesting choice. I like how they show the magnitude of each of the aspects of the balance sheet and income statement and how they contribute to the overall. Some users might be unfamiliar with how to read a waterfall chart. Summarizing the net income on the right is nice as well. A traditional bullet chart might be more clear for comparing CY to PY, as I had a hard time hovering over the dot to see what it was showing.
- On the Income Statement and Balance Sheet, the summarized information and KPI indicators, along with the spark bars, pack in a lot of information without feeling crowded or like a wall of text. The “click to expand” functionality works well to provide the drill down into the company-level details without making the dashboard feel crowded or clunky. The visual indicator that the metric is expanded is a really nice touch. 👍
Nice work by all who participated in this session! Session 3 will be looking at Citizen Service Requests, so head over to the RWFD Information page for the data set, and requirements and link to the Tableau Accelerator if you need some ideas!