Week 2 Presentation: My Application Viz and Improvements

by Cammy Phillips

For this Fridays challenge we were tasked with recreating our final application viz with improvements from the things we have learnt this week.

Although I was happy with my initial viz (above) when I submitted it for my final interview, I was under no illusion that it was the best it could be due to my limited knowledge of tableau at the time. In just 3 days of 'tableau time' I feel I have learnt a great deal of ways on visual best practice and also tips and tricks about how to do the basics In tableau properly. I am also sure that if I came back to this at the end of my training I would be able to make many more iterations.

The first big change I made to my viz was to remove a lot of the additional text. When I was presenting I knew I was going to cover these facts so I would be more visually appealing to a viewer to remove it and also a lot easier to follow.

I also added a years to months parameter to my change in crash frequency chart. This allowed me to switch the X axis between years and months, meaning the viewer would have a greater understanding of how time can effect the number of bike incidence.

For the next two charts I made minimal changes.

A change I made was removing the darker grey panel on the side of the weekday chart and adding it as a subheading of the chart instead. The reason I did this was to try to better format my viz (thanks to what I have learnt during best practice).

I had planned to add some supplementary data about how many days are clear/ cloudy/ rainy each year, just to give some context. I initially would assume that most days in Austin, Texas are sunny so maybe the cloudy or rainy days have a higher frequency of crashes. However, due to time constraints I wasn't able to do this.

I was also going to make this chart a bar bell type chart just to make it more obvious that the males where involved in a higher number of crashes than women in all of the age groups. However, when coming to do this I struggled to do this in a way that was visually appealing so I left it how it was and made it more obvious in the tooltip.

For my map graph the only thing I changed was that instead of of just having the type of injury in the tooltip I included if the accident occurred at an intersection. This is because intersections are known to be dangerous places in terms of car accidents.

For my avg speed limit chart I included in the tool tip the difference in average speed limit of different severity of crashes and if anyone was charged by the police for the accident.

For my final conclusion I just streamlined the text to conclude the take home messages, just for a viewer to look back at and remember post presentation.

Things that you cannot see that I think also improved my viz was interactivity between my first table (click crash severity) and all of the below tables and also the weekday chart changed what day we viewed for the entire viz - something I believe contextualised the viz a lot.

In my interview I also had the feedback that it may have been nice to change my chart titles to the questions they were answering instead of the answers - mainly to keep a viewer more engaged and also because sometimes with interactivity the answers could be slightly skewed.

Finally, all of my tooltips included supplementary data and sometimes statistics just to add clarity and visual pull to by dashboard. I made an effort to change them from their default settings to highlight data that is the most important in each graph.