Welcome to my third post of Dashboard Week!
In case you’re asking, what is dashboard week? Dashboard week is a week where, during each day, all the data schoolers create a dashboard and post about it! Wednesday’s challenge was creating a dashboard using data from Kickstarter.
Overview
Today our challenge involved a Kaggle dataset about Kickstarter projects! I recently wrote a blog on finding datasets and highlighted Kaggle as a great source. In addition to the usual challenges, today we were asked to use Tableau only (i.e. no Alteryx).
Meaningful Maps
Capturing meaningful insights should be the goal of any visualisation. While maps look good, they need to serve a purpose. When comparing countries by a percentage of successful kickstarters, we have Hong Kong and Singapore sitting near the top.
Having worked in Shenzhen (China’s Silicon Valley sitting directly above Hong Kong) doing High Tech, this is not surprising. A large number of startups in the region move to or at least register in Hong Kong for a myriad of reasons. Tax being a big one.
The issue with putting this on a world map is Hong Kong and Singapore happen to be islands, and islands happen to be hard to see.
Where is Hong Kong and Singapore?
The Easy Fix
Therefore, we have two options. Show a map which doesn’t capture meaningful information, or ditch the world map. I chose the latter. Splitting the world map into regional maps was an easy fix to make these islands visible again.
How To
Doing this can either be a slow and painful process or a speedy one with a bit of foresight. If you know this is where your viz is heading, the process is quite easy.
- Create a world map
- Format the world map
- If you’re using colour, fix it!
That means checking the boxes for start, end and centre. This step is crucial because when separating the world map, each regional map will use a subset of the dataset, ergo each regional map will have a different min and max. If using percentages, it’s good practice to set to 0 and 1 anyway.
Final Step
Duplicate, Filter, Rename and Fix
If you did step one to three correctly, then the last step is quite easy. Because now, changing something that isn’t mutually exclusive will mean changing every map. It will be up to you whether you need to delete regional maps and repeat step four, but doing so will also mean putting the maps back on your dashboard. Why Fix the maps? Because now you don’t want people moving the maps around. Losing interactability is a tradeoff, but in the right situation, this can create a visually appealing dashboard.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read my blog! If you have any comments, suggestions or want to chat, free to connect with me on my LinkedIn!
~ Ryan Edwards
Author: Ryan Edwards
BCom BSc from the University of Auckland. Prime Minister’s Scholar & Ex. Toastmasters President.