“It’s already day 5!” or should I say, “its finally day 5!”. What an intense roller coaster the week has been. Many hours has been spent exploring new data, cleaning data, looking for new data, creating a story and putting that all into visualisation this week.
Today’s final challenge is given to us at 9:00 am and we have 5 – 6 hours to create a dashboard and write up a blog.
The Data
The data we received for the challenge is the challenge given to DSAU10’s application; Iowa Liquor Sales. The data itself is quite clean aside from a few nulls here and there. This could affect the outcome of the story you are trying to tell. Without much wrangling, I jumped straight into Tableau.
The Story
I’m not much of an alcohol drinker so the exploration of this data doesn’t appeal to me very much. So, I tried to think outside the box on what story the coaches in Data School hasn’t already seen. In the end, I came up with a comparison study. I wanted to compare alcohol consumption with a standard object everyone would know. So the first thing that came to mind was a swimming pool. Better yet, the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
The Viz
With the story in mind, I started to work on the viz. The story seems great and all however I didn’t know how I wanted to visualise it. What I initially had in mind, was some bars to show number of consumption. Then some text to show the comparison. But this seemed way too simple with no interaction. So i started to think more on what I could show, so I came up with categorising the different liquor sold, like whiskey, tequila and so forth. I then created a shape chart that shows how much pool can it fill up based on alcohol consumption by state. I then only show the top 10 and then created a divider on the row, basically like a swimming pool. I also added an image of a swimming in the background to show my comparison. And this is my end result:
Personal Feedback:
Overall, with 5 – 6 hours to create a dashboard from a new dataset, create a story and write a blog, I am very pleased with it. It is also the first time I used an image in the background and I am actually quite happy with how it turned out.
Check out my viz here.
