Day 2 dashboarding is DONE! Today’s dataset was….. sports. Not all that exciting for myself personally, especially given I don’t have a single clue about baseball, it was a bit of a groan when Craig revealed the dataset. “Oh no… I thought sports was over and done with after the AFL interview challenge”. We were given the Sunday Sports Viz March datasets and gave us a choice of week 1 or 2. I went with week 1 for the simple reason that there was less files to download.
The Brief
Data Prep
I quickly loaded all the files onto Alteryx, read the README file on how to join my files, and quitckly decided to avoid my weakness – anything too baseball technical. The Hall Of Fame supplementary file jumped out at me so I decided to run along with it and use that as the basis of my viz. From there I was going back and forth on research into baseball and the README file to figure out which field I actually needed. I had some trouble joining some files together so I opted to transform the files I would blend on Tableau into Alteryx into hypers instead so I could improve performance downstream.
The Idea & The Challenge
“What does it take to get into the MLB Hall Of Fame?” The Script ran through my head all day as I mapped drafted a bunch of charts to explore insights. Finding insights wasn’t hard. The hard part was figuring out how to sew everything together into an effective story. In fact, at one point I had 9 charts on a dashboard trying to figure out how to fit them all in. I knew I wanted to make it personal and played around with the idea of “Tips to increase your odds of getting into the MLB Hall Of Fame” and even having a section featuring notable players (e.g. Least amount of time between debut and induction).
But in the end, an idea came to me to try an infographic/ article style visualisation instead. I write every now and then as a hobby and love writing articles with tips and tricks (e.g. Things People Didn’t Tell You About International Travel). But I haven’t tried applying my data viz skills to that yet so here’s an opportunity to try.
The Dashboard (Interactive Viz)
The viz today is simple. An overview at the top, no more than 5 tips, and a story accompanying each chart. Here’s the final output for you all (Link to Interactive Viz)
What Went Well
- Plenty of content to choose from
- Focused chart choice
- Catchy title
- Use of annotations to contextualise data
- A bit better timeboxing
- Clean formatting
Even Better If
- Variety of charts ( I don’t think my chart choices are the MOST effective yet)
- Tool tip clean up + tool tip viz
- Dynamic name in Axis for Metrics in scatterplot
- Better chart type for Tip 3’t
