Week 42: Formula E

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the week after TC17 should be nice and quiet, with everyone recovering and keeping a low profile. Makeover Monday doesn’t stop just because we want to :-). So on Sunday as I woke up to a sunny morning in San Francisco, the data went out and the community got busy visualizing Formula E results.

While I personally found the topic challenging, there were clearly a number of people who really embraced it and enjoyed working on a subject that they were interested in.

After skipping Viz Review during conference week, we were back to it this week and once again the community submitted a number of vizzes for review and followed up with improvements on their original visualizations. Seeing you embrace our feedback and work to learn and improve your work is something that Andy and I get really excited about, so thank you for not just seeking out feedback but also taking it onboard.

Aside from learning from feedback, I also found it encouraging and inspiring to host two Makeover Monday live events with Andy this week. Getting dataviz enthusiasts, newbies and experienced users, together in a room and participating in a 60min Makeover Monday challenge is fun and it’s a great way for us to connect with the community.

Thumbs up for everyone who showed up in Munich and Milan this week. We had a blast and thank you for getting involved!

MUNICH

MILAN

Looking at this week’s submissions, one thing stood out for me to include as a lesson in this recap:

LESSON: DO YOU REALLY NEED ICONS, MAPS AND ALL THAT COLOUR?

It’s great seeing people experiment with visualizations for different topics and try out new approaches and techniques. We encourage you to get creative as much as you like. What we also want to encourage you to do is to be critical of your own data visualizations.

Sometimes including lots of colours, icons, images and a map can distract from the key message of your viz and data story. It’s fun to try things out and change it up a little and this week was a good opportunity to do so.

When we want to communicate information effectively, however, we need to make sure that we don’t let our design choices get in the way of it.

My suggestion would be to design your viz with all the different elements you have in mind and then duplicate the sheets and turn them into simple bar charts etc. and to see for yourself which version is better for telling your data story. You could even publish both, the ‘fun viz’ and the one that focuses purely on the data.

I am personally not very good at all at using pictures, icons and lines, arrows, etc. effectively in dashboards. It always looks like I try too hard and it makes me cringe when I see the end result, which is why I stick to simple charts and let those more skilled at graphic design do what they’re good at.

I want to encourage you to try things out but not feel obliged to go ‘all out’ with graphic design if you’re not happy with the end result. Bar charts, line charts and scatter plots are perfectly fine ways to visualize and communicate information.

With that said, let’s look at this week’s

FAVORITES

Author: Rob Radburn
Link: Tableau Public

What I like about it:

• Beautifully simple visualization summarizing all the analysis within a small amount of points
• Great effective colour legend, making it very clear how to read the chart
• Rob asks a question in his subtitle and answers it straight away
• I can see at a glance that he is right and that there were more races won from grid positions across all years and rounds than from pole position
• Including the slope to show the grid position helps identify those pilots who made up the most places throughout their race

Author: Ann Jackson
Link: Tableau Public

What I like about it:

• Certainly the coolest bump chart I’ve ever seen
• Being able to compare the positions throughout the races quite easily. The horizontal and vertical lines instead of slopes make it much easier to see the change, at least in my opinion
• Great interactivity and highlight actions
• Beautiful minimalist design

Author: Mike Cisneros
Link: Tableau Public

What I like about it:

• Mike always focuses on analysis and this viz is no exception, showing the success of teams over three seasons
• Succinct description of his findings and instructions on how to use the viz
• Great tooltips
• Great attention to detail throughout the whole viz

Author: Charlie Hutcheson
Link: Tableau Public

What I like about it:

• It’s a true makeover and definitely an improvement on the original
• Great tooltips
• Clean design
• Effective highlight actions