After quite a lull in submissions for Makeover Monday week 38, which Eva wrote about here, the Community has come back strong. Surely there had to be over 150 vizzes created this week. Heck, I think we review 20 or so in 90 minutes on this week’s Viz Review. The enthusiasm of you all is quite infectious. If I can’t keep up with everything, that’s definitely a good sign. Keep it up!
LESSON 1: PRACTICE NEW TECHNIQUES
Makeover Monday is fantastic platform for trying new things. Whether it be new chart types, new design techniques, storytelling, whatever, we love when we see people using Makeover Monday as a way to learn. We can’t emphasize enough to companies how valuable providing your teams time to participate in MM can be for their every day jobs.
This week, Sergey Yasinov used MM as a way to recreate the famous OECD better life index visualisation.
Sure there are some iterations Sergey could make. Kudos to him though for trying something new. I bet he learned a lot!
There are also quite of few of you that participate in both Makeover Monday and Workout Wednesday and this week Mahfooj Khan killed two birds with one stone, combining the requirements from WW week 38 with the data for MM week 39.
The point here is to encourage you to try new things, push your boundaries, and learn.
LESSON 2: KEEP IT SIMPLE
This week’s data was simple and it was great to see so many people keeping the visualisations simple as well. Considering that the audience for MM typically only ever sees a picture of your viz, the simpler you keep the visualisation, often the better the outcome. Fancy doesn’t win my heart, simple does. I love vizzes that are clear, to the point, and effective. After all, we’re trying to communicate data with pictures; the more complicated you make your communication, the harder it will be for your audience to understand your message. Take this practice into your day job and I bet you’re audience will love you.
As an example, Nurul Shi not only pushed herself to learn a new chart type, she also made the data incredibly clear and simple to understand. Using a slope graph to compare two regions is a genius way to communicate the story. Well done Nurul!
Suraj Shah took possibly the simplest approach possible to this makeover. He took the spirals and flattened them out. Simple, effective, quick!
LESSON 3: WRITE ABOUT YOUR WORK
There’s been a massive increase this year in the number of people writing about Makeover Monday. I preach to people all the time that there’s only one person that will build your own brand and THAT’S YOU! You own your own brand. There are so many companies now that when they’re looking for Tableau talent, the first place they look is Tableau Public. Don’t ever remove any vizzes from Public. Why? Because it shows a progression in your work; it shows how you’ve grown and improved.
And on your Tableau Public profile, be sure to include a link to your blog. It doesn’t take much time to write about MM and this is also very valuable for building your brand. Eva and I know of nine people that have gotten jobs directly because of their Public profile and using MM to build up that profile is an easy way to show diversity in your designs, analytical thought, amongst other skills.
We maintain a Community page listing people that write about Makeover Monday. If we’re missing you, tell us and we’ll get you added. This week, I noticed two new bloggers: Dana Symons and Axel Waleczek. I love reading these posts; I’m sure they inspire others as they do me.
LESSON 4: ACCEPT FEEDBACK FOR WHAT IT IS…FEEDBACK
Eva and I happily give up our time for this project and it’s rewarding for us to see that people appreciate and act upon the feedback we give. Of course, I would hope people would act on feedback if they ask for it in the Viz Reviews, but you never know. Are we perfect and all knowing? Of course not. I find our discussions on Viz Review quite fun, reactionary and productive. We intentionally try NOT to look at vizzes in detail before the webinars so that our feedback is more organic and genuine. For me, this results in a more “real” review of the work.
This week, we went into quite a bit of detail about Charlie Hutcheson‘s viz.
I won’t go into that detail again as Charlie has done a magnificent job of implementing the changes we suggested, including creating 15 calculations so that his tooltips reflected the color of the marks. That’s dedication!
Such a fantastic week for Makeover Monday this week and exactly the enthusiasm that continues to drive each and every one of us to improve every day! With that, here are my week 39 favorites.
FAVORITES
Author: Jeff Plattner
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Simple design and layout
- Good color choices
- Love the font!
- Labeling only the bottom of the first axis
- Including the gridline for 25% makes comparison easy both across and down the viz
Author: David Hoskins
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Dot plot makes comparisons to the selected region easy
- Dot plot reveals the range of participation well
- Allowing the user to highlight the region they’re interested in
- Simple, clean viz that’s easy to understand
- Design encourages interaction
Author: Rodrigo Calloni
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Beautiful design!
- Title, logo, and background image really make it look like it’s Nielsen branded
- Using BANs to accentuate the important numbers
- Using colors that go well with the Nielsen logo
- Great interactivity!
- Using a heatmap and ordering the dimensions alphabetically makes it easy to lookup what you’re interested in
Author: Kermit
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Iterated through lots of feedback
- Highlighting the largest bar in each region
- Using consistent colors within each region
- Labeling the inside end of the largest bar
- NOT labeling all other bars to reduce clutter
- Organizing the rows and columns alphabetically for easier lookup
Author: Lawer Akrofi
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Using simple, muted colors
- Including a grey bar behind to dots to show the range
- Only showing the axis labels at every 10% to reduce clutter
- Iterative on feedback to continually improve
- Simple tooltips
- Great “glow” feature when you hover over a point
- Using the legend as a highlighter (check it out)
Author: Alexander Waleczek
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Excellent example of a ranked bump chart
- Keeping the dots on top of the lines so the lines don’t show through
- Good title and subtitle that explain the findings
- Good highlighting on hover
- Labeling the dots on both ends so you don’t have to move your eyes all over the place
- Including text to show how the diets are ordered