Dashboard Kitsch

Kitsch (/ˈkɪtʃ/; loanword from German) is a low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural icons. Kitsch generally includes unsubstantial or gaudy works or decoration, or works that are calculated to have popular appeal.

wikipedia

A gnome or two in your garden can be cute, even enchanting. But when you have a whole herd of zombie gnomes on your lawn, you have gone to the dark side, my friend. I'm suggesting that you are dangerously close to becoming a 'Collector'.

Playing Nice with Tableau or How to Build a Dashboard That Your Co-Workers Can Maintain If You Get Hit By a Bus

We all like to think we're indispensable at work, but we're not. We're just not.

So get over yourself, Simon.

Have you ever built the most clever Excel dashboard/database/reporting system that you knew would keep you in the money for years?

You know you did, Simon. Yes, and it was forever referred to as the "Simon Chan Report". After the accolades, you settle in to maintain the damned thing, month after month, year after year. And it's taking up a lot of your time because it has become so complex (named ranges, linked fields, complex multi-layered formulas, vba) that any new request for change will take weeks to implement. It really has no business being an Excel report.

Finishing Touches to Avoid Clickin' Confusion

How often do you find users get confused clicking around on your viz? Surprisingly, a lot, right? You think it's fairly simple, just click to filter.  But most people double-click. Telling everyone not to double-click is pointless. So they double click and zoom in on a chart and are completely baffled as to how to get out of it (it's not entirely intuitive). Or they click on a chart that doesn't zoom, but it highlights and dims all the other values (which you don't want).

Finishing Touches: Fonts

CLICK ME!

If you are like me, fonts are the last thing you think of when building a viz or dashboard.  To make my life simpler, I decided to put together a few font combinations for quick reference.

I don't know much about font combining  (other than what I've read here), so I try to keep the number to a minimum and try not to have them competing for dominance.

This is pretty much the list of fonts I use in Tableau. I know they aren't exciting, but I can count on how they will behave on different Windows or Mac versions and different browsers. Besides, when it comes to dashboards, I don't want the font to be the star anymore than the colors. The font is there like any other element; to help convey the message that the data contains.

Please note that I'm talking about work, work here. When it comes to play visualizations, all bets are off and all fonts are fair game, even ComicSans.

Finishing Touches: Sources and URLs in Tooltips

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Have you ever played with your data for so long that you don't know if there's really a story there or if you've just exhausted your curiosity and now aren't really that interested in telling anyone what you found?  I have that problem with writing conclusions - I want to write 'see above' and be done with it.

This meteorite analysis ran way too long.  The data was made available for a visualization challenge with Visualizing.org back in February 2013 after the Chelyabinsk meteor landed in Russia.  I downloaded the data, played with it and then couldn't tell if there was any there there.  I needed to either put it away or find more data.  I put it away.

I'm sharing it now because it has a sweet tip that I learned in Stephen McDaniel and Eileen McDaniel's Tableau Dashboard workshop:  adding URLs to tooltips.  This is a great way to provide links to the data sources on your dashboard.

Tableau Finishing Touches: Images

Shapes for Labels

Sometimes showing labels doesn't work because of the shading ranges as with this map.  Applying black font won't show on the provinces with the lowest employment rate and a grey font won't show on the other provinces.  To fix this, I used a dual axis map and for the second axis, I've used a blurry image as a shape file.

Tableau Finishing Touches: Data Date Range

As with everything we build, it's the finishing touches that seem to make a big difference.  How many times have you produced a brilliant report only to have someone point out that one little miss (not mistake) that has nothing to do with the analysis and yet that's what everyone is focusing on?  Well, these things matter because they tend to distract your audience.

The best defence against these misses is to have a kind editor review for you.  These friends are invaluable, but there often isn't time.  So, I've decided to do a series of posts that cover all the little bits of simple finishing touches that I've learned to do the hard way (by having them pointed out to me in meetings) or through the guidance of Tableau guru blog posts like this one Hey! Your Tableau Public Viz is Ugly and Confusing.