INTRODUCTION
It’s the second last day of dashboard week and we’ve been given a well-made data source today! Our challenge is to use Victoria Roads crash statistics over 15 years to create a Viz. Similar to makeover Mondays, we were shown an example of what the bar is. It’s not very high. With that in mind, we were challenged to find new stories, and a nice way to show them. Let’s take a look at my approach.
STRATEGY:
Unlike the previous days, we do not have to do much data wrangling. The files we were given have one single unique key which made our lives so much easier. The only difficulty today is figuring out what I actually need and what to use. There were 8 different sheets, all containing important information, with one master sheet. In my excitement during data discovery, I wanted to show more and more different things. To anchor myself, I chose to lock down one central idea before adding more around it.
I wanted to explore the 10 most common crash types, defined by the DCA. With that set created, I could now find everything else around it to be filtered by those types. This includes weather/road conditions, types of crashes as well as most common age, car make and colour of at-fault drivers. This required many many joins, but thanks to the all useful key, this was a breeze in Alteryx. Next up was to craft the Viz.
CRAFTING THE VIZ ON CRASHES
Creating the graphs and pages with the data was relatively simple. There was very little tinkering required and I had most of everything in an hour. This allowed me to focus on my weakest Tableau area, formatting and colours. I dedicated the last few hours (wanting to finish by 5) to this. I’ve also noticed a trend with my dashboards over the last few days: I love using shapes. I think they make it really easy to show boring information in a fun way. I’m still struggling to put things I’ve made together in a dashboard but I’m really happy with the colours and design this time.
Thankfully, today was a relatively issue-free day. The only main challenge was finding and focusing on one idea. Once I had that, it was a lot easier to finish the visualization. With one more day left I’m actually going to miss these challenges! It’s really taught me a lot about how to manage time, be focused and craft a plan before I start. It’s also exposed a lot of what I’m weak at in Tableau, and encouraged me to continue practising and improving!
Author: Jason Yeo
Jason is originally from Malaysia and has lived in Hong Kong and Australia. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Actuarial Studies and a Bachelor in Commerce, majoring in Business Strategy and Finance at UNSW. He has a passion for problem-solving and data analytics, hence he decided to pursue a career in this industry and pivoted into the Data School. In his free time, he enjoys sports, going to the gym and he likes music and playing his guitar.