Real World Fake Data – Retail Recap

Welcome back! RWFD Session #8 is in the books and I want to thank each and every one of you sharing your vizzes on Twitter and LinkedIn. Session #8 was based on retail transaction data, including loyalty memberships, coupon usage and the data went down to the hourly transaction level. Lots of directions you could go for a really deep analysis, and the two highlights for this month explored some of those deeper analytical paths, and did it with blazing style.

The first highlight comes from Davide Di Canio. This is his 3rd piece of work in his Tableau Public and it’s simply beautiful. The first element that caught my eye was the state sales KPIs on the right. Normally, I’d shy away from a radial bar chart like this, but the execution of it here by separating them by state, and highlighting the state in each separation make it very easy to see who’s leading and who’s lagging. If this was a single viz, with the bars colored for each state I think it would be more distracting. I also love the ability to turn the states on and off for the rest of the viz to explore specific states. The month over month comparison and the calendar period picker is really well executed allowing a great period over period view. Can’t wait to see what else comes from Davide’s profile. If you aren’t following him on Tableau Public yet, I recommend it.

Davide Di Canio (Profile | Viz)

The second highlight comes from Anthony Smoak. Anything I think about retail, hourly traffic and calendar days always come to mind as a starting point, and Anthony delivers here with a nice heat map for the hours by days of week. Even from this fake data, I can see that my Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are seeing traffic higher than other days. That insight may effect staffing, or maybe I might try and entice people to come in on slower days with coupons. Super simple viz for an impactful insight… that’s what it’s all about. The only piece of feedback I have here is the double encoding on the city bar charts. Thinking about the processing of preattentive attributes, the length of the bar is more effective than the sequential color palette. Plus, on some of the small bars, the grey almost disappears. Be sure and follow Anthony on Tableau Public as well. He produces stellar work and you don’t want to miss a thing.

Anthony Smoak (Profile | Viz)

Session #9 is live and the data is about Supply Chain/Manufacturing. This is our most complex data set to-date. So, with that said, take your time and really dig in. Feel free to change aliases in the data to make it more life like if you desire to… there a lots of avenues to explore in this multi-faceted dataset. Enjoy!