Makeover Monday in 2018

Today Andy and I revealed our plans for the coming year and what we will change and improve about Makeover Monday to continue delivering value for the community and to further grow the project.

If you want to be taken through these 10 highlights, check out the recording of our webinar:

 

 

Otherwise, just keep reading for a recap of the main points.

 

1. The Data

 

We’re excited to partner with our new friends at data.world who are providing our new data platform.

 

The benefits for you:

• All the data in one convenient place without running into download or access issues which sometimes happened on onedrive
• A web data connector for Tableau and Tableau Public
• The ability to embed your interactive visualisations in the discussion thread with the dataset
• Access to a wider data community
• Notifications of new datasets by email

 

The benefits for us:

• Creating and uploading a single file saves us a lot of time
• Easy to share content
• Preparing datasets weeks in advance to accommodate busy times in our schedule on the weekend
• Not running into storage limitations
• Making our datasets and therefore the project more tool-agnostic and accessible to the wider dataviz community

 

 

2. The Twitter

 

Thanks to our weekly Viz Review webinars we’ve been able to provide much more effective feedback. Even with the 280 character limit, Twitter remains a sup-optimal platform for having real conversations about data, data analysis and visualisation. We will still continue to tweet updates, datasets etc. but will be open to shifting more of the real discussions to data.world.

 

The benefits for you:

• Keep doing what you’re doing on Twitter to grow your exposure, entertain and inform your followers and connect with the community
• Continue sharing your visualisations with hashtags and get noticed beyond Makeover Monday
• The established process for getting feedback during Viz Review relies on Twitter and won’t change (unless we ever find a better way to keep track of submissions seeking feedback)

 

The benefits for us:

• We can continue engaging with you on Twitter. This can be in the form of a quick like to show that we’ve seen your viz or a comment if we have something brief to contribute.
• We can easily follow the feed of the #MakeoverMonday and #MMVizReview hashtags
• We can also bring Tableau, Tableau Public and other vendors into the online discussion and broaden the exposure

 

And here for illustration purposes is an example of a perfect #MakeoverMonday tweet:

Includes

• #MakeoverMonday and #MMVizReview (optional)
• @VizWizBI and @TriMyData (makes it easier for us to see your viz in our feed)
• A link to Tableau Public
• A neat (!!!) screenshot image of the entire viz
• A brief description of the key message

 

3. Viz Review

 

I’m really glad that Andy and I are both enjoying Viz Review equally, because it makes it more fun and effective for everyone. We will continue and will do our best to streamline the timing and make it more consistent.

We kindly ask those who seek feedback to address the feedback afterwards and acknowledge it in some way. That does NOT mean you have to do everything we suggest. Letting us know you’ve understood our points and then making some effort to incorporate changes to improve your viz are greatly appreciated. If people don’t act on feedback it’s simply a waste of time which we could otherwise spend helping those who really want to iterate. We appreciate you understanding that point ;-).

 

The benefits for you:

• It’s an opt-in system, if you want feedback, this is how you tell us: Add #MMVizReview to your original (please 🙂 ) tweet
• We typically spend a couple of minutes (2-4min) on each viz and can give much more comprehensive feedback that way than through individual tweets
• You can watch us interact with your viz, which again helps to relate our feedback to your work more easily than in a Twitter thread
• You get to watch the feedback we have from others, which is a good opportunity to learn from their vizzes and possible mistakes

 

The benefits for us:

• A compact session of 60-90min every week during which we give all the feedback we possibly can
• It’s really fun
• We learn a lot too: we explore every viz (on Twitter we just look at images), we see new tricks and techniques, as well as designs, we feel more connected to our community and the individual authors and we get better at giving succinct feedback in a short amount of time (at least we think we do)
• Less social media activities to keep up with = a bit more time away from the screen compared to the past

 

For upcoming webinars check our webinars page…

 

4. The Blog

 

We will continue to write the weekly recap blogs with lessons learned and favourites. We will make them more compact and condense our content to two lessons each week – one focused on analysis skills and the other on design and storytelling. Favorites will remain a key part of these blogs with a gallery layout like we’ve used the last couple of weeks.

 

The benefit for you:

• You still get the weekly lessons learned with a focus on the ‘big ticket items’
• You will most likely see a change back to punctual delivery on Fridays

 

The benefit for us:

• Condensing our feedback will save us about 1 hour a week
• We can more consistently publish these blogs on Fridays by reducing the workload

 

5. The Events

 

Live Makeover Monday events are a lot of fun and we truly enjoy doing them. Travelling the world to run them unfortunately isn’t something we can realistically do. Where possible we will host events as long as they can be reasonably aligned with our work and personal commitments. We also encourage you to setup your own events and – if you want to – simply dial us in via Skype to join for the presentations at the end or a hello at the beginning.

A lot can be done through technology and remotely and until we can jet to all the wonderful places, let’s use the technology to bring everyone together.

If you’re interested in hosting a live Makeover Monday event and need our help, just let us know…

 

The benefit for you:

• Where possible we will still be running live events, especially at conferences
• You are totally free to get involved and plan your own event. We are working on some guidelines and tips to make it easy and a success for you
• Simply talk to us if you have questions or need help

 

The benefit for us:

• We still get to run the key events at conferences
• We also get to spend a bit more time at home
• We love to connect with the community, so joining an event remotely is a fun way for us to participate without the travel costs, jet lag and CO2 emissions 😉

 

6. Makeover Monday Enterprise Edition

 

We are passionate about helping people learn and improve. We have recognised that sometimes those in charge of teams in organisations need to be convinced that regular practice and collaboration are a great way to foster communities and continuous improvement.

We are (i.e. I am) working on a plan for reaching more corporate organisations to help them establish internal dataviz communities based on the idea of Makeover Monday to bring people together for joint practice and support.

 

The benefit for you:

• Content, tips and tricks to get your internal community started
• A growing network of enthusiasts who are already up and running and can help get you off the ground
• New ideas and some convincing arguments to take to your management

 

The benefit for us:

• Growing independent communities that foster this kind of skill development will help organisations and everyone in them become successful with data much quicker
• Increasing our reach means we can connect you with other exciting opportunities in the future
• Learning from organisations what works and doesn’t work when doing Makeover Monday in a business context

 

7. Tracking

 

We don’t currently track submissions as it is too time consuming. If you are a pro with writing scripts that can automate the process for us, we’re all ears.

 

The benefit for you:

• If you want to get involved and help us gather data about our project, this is a great opportunity to do so
• You’d help the community and those who want to track their submissions (e.g. lecturers who use Makeover Monday for grading in their courses)

 

The benefit for us:

• Compared to the tracking efforts Andy made previously, this has been a huge time saver
• If you do build us a script, we’d be very grateful. To offer your help, just get in touch on Twitter

 

8. New Tools

 

Makeover Monday, while dominated by the Tableau community because that’s our playground, is not specific to any particular tool and we love seeing users from other communities join us. Our partnership with data.world will open up the project to the wider data community and make it more accessible.

We have started talking to Yellowfin and Microstrategy as well as PowerBI to join us in our weekly dataviz challenges.

 

The benefit for you:

 

• We can all always learn something new and broaden our horizons
• New people with different tools bring new perspectives and find different answers to data challenges
• You get to see what’s possible and not possible with other dataviz and BI tools

 

The benefit for us:

 

• We love a good challenge and trying different tools will be an interesting one
• We enjoy learning something new and seeing how different things look when other tools are used
• Variety in the vizzes, contributions and questions will add to the depth of this project
• We really like seeing how things work in other places

 

9. The Website

 

Our website has been loyally and (almost always) reliably supporting us but in my opinion it can be optimised to make valuable content easier to find and maybe it could even do with a bit of a makeover itself.

We’ll be looking at our options for a bit of a refresh in the coming weeks and months.

 

The benefit for you:

• Eventually, content will be easier to find and access
• The website will turn into a repository for all things Makeover Monday including new sections that currently don’t exist but have been on my list
• It will become easier for newbies to get started in the project as they can find all the information there to participate, make submissions, seek feedback and join the conversation

 

The benefit for us:

• Structuring the content more effectively means we can point people to the website as the first resource which will save us time
• We will align the design with other things we have planned (see point 10) so that Makeover Monday becomes more recognisable

 

 

10. The Book

 

Yes, we’re writing a book in 2018. We’re currently in negotiations but are excited and eager to get started. Makeover Monday is a project by the community and for the community and this sentiment will strongly feature in the book. We can’t wait to share our progress with you.

 

The benefit for you:

• You’ll be able to hold a real-life book in your hands in the future that you contributed to, no matter how ‘small’ your contributions may seem to you. Everyone here makes a difference for us
• The book will capture memories but also provide valuable content for improving skills

 

The benefit for us:

• We get to write a book which is a really cool thing to do (I have always wanted to write a book, I just didn’t know what I should write about – now I know)
• We can share our passion with a wider audience in a format that is durable and will be beautiful to look at
• We have an exciting ‘new’ project to focus on in the new year
• We get to practice our time management skills

 

 

And that is it. Thanks for reading and we look forward to having you join us for Makeover Monday in 2018! (and of course next week – there are no breaks…)

 

Eva & Andy