I bought four bikes in the last couple of months, so when I ran across a visualisation about stolen bikes in the UK, I had to open it up to everyone. In addition to lots of interesting visualisations this week, we also hosted another Makeover Monday Live; this week we were in Dublin, Ireland with about 75 other Tableau enthusiasts at the Dublin TUG hosted by The Information Lab Ireland.
Admittedly, this has been a crazy busy week for me. Between Alteryx Inspire Europe, prepping for the Dublin TUG and doing analysis on Gaelic football, I simply ran out of time and didn’t get to take notes about lessons learned throughout the week. However, I would like to share one.
LESSON 1: CONTEXT IS KEY
My original visualisation contained this map of bikes stolen by police area.
I outlined in my blog post that I used a log scale on color to account for the dramatic scaling that London brings into the mix. However, I really shouldn’t have done this. As a commenter on my blog pointed out, it would have been way better to show bikes stolen per capita and I couldn’t agree more. Looking at bikes stolen per capita lets an individual know much better how much THEY are at risk.
I went to the ONS website and found population estimates by police area and this is how the map look now.
Quite a difference and the story is much different. I must note that I removed City of London from the map because no one lives there so they numbers are outrageously skewed if I include it. What sticks out now is that Cambridgeshire is the hotspot for bike theft.
The lesson is clear: when you can include context, do so. With that, let’s get onto my favorites for week 37.
FAVORITES
Author: Louise Shorten
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Louise created this beautiful viz in under an hour under the pressure of Makeover Monday Live, then presented it to 75 people. Rockstar!
- Including the overall trend at the top, then going into detail below it
- Simply, clean design
- Using dividers between the sections to split up the viz
- Good action filters
- Giving credit for the icon source
Author: Athan Mavrantonis
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Athan’s designs are always so beautiful and engaging!
- Focusing the story on a single area
- Beautiful heatmap
- Great use of color
- Using a dual-axis map for the LSOA and each individual crime
- Great interactivity
- Using BANs for summarization
- Including a call to action
Author: Staticum
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Iterating on feedback to create an even more compelling design
- Use of color (or lack thereof)
- Focusing on the top 10 to make it relevant for the audience
- Nice title and subtitle
- Using BANs and big text to make the viz stand out
- Making the font on the scale very small
- Keeping the scale consistent for all 10 locations so they can be more easily compared
- Great tooltips
- Including a call to action