MakeoverMonday

I don’t usually get to attend Tableau User Groups. We don’t (yet?) have one down in the depths of New Zealand’s south island, and it’s a long drive to the nearest one in Christchurch. But with New Zealand and much of the world in some form of lock down, Tableau has encouraged and supported virtual user group meetings. So I was excited to dial into this weeks virtual New Zealand Tableau User Group meeting jointly arranged by Alex, Thabata, Jeff and Paul from the Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington groups. The icing on the cake was being invited to speak about my experience with Makeover Monday! ...

An interesting and deceptively simple data set on alcohol consumption by country for 2019 week 26. I like the simplicity of the table of data and the factors affecting the top 25 that are discussed in the article. The chart itself would be better as bars not columns in my opinion, allowing the country names to be laid out for easier reading. As Eva noted in her submission showing liters of pure alcohol consumed per capita per year isn’t that easy to relate to. Digging into the definitions for standard drinks / units I was surprised to find that there is quite a range, and that some countries still don’t define a standard drink. I decided to focus on that aspect for my makeover. ...

Andy Kriebel selected a data set about US workers paid at/below the minimum wage for those choosing to participate in week 3, 2019. The original viz highlights some of the regional differences for 2017 by showing the data geographically. I like that I can see regional differences, but I found myself wanting to see the trend over time (as it’s available in the data set) to see if the geographical trends are part of an ongoing story. ...

Makeover Monday 2019 week 1 looks at NHL attendances since the 2000-01 season. A couple of things emerge from an exploration of the data set provided: firstly there are seasons where labour disputes, or lockouts, dramatically affect attendances. Secondly some teams have different stories to the general trend. I spent most of my time exploring and presenting the lockout story, but added a team selector to allow users to explore average game attendance by team. ...

A couple of my colleagues are giving Makeover Monday a go to practice some recent Tableau Desktop training, so I’m back into it too! This week we were given a data set from Figure Eight about wearable tech products, with the challenge to makeover the charts in this article from 2014, about where we are wearing our wearable tech. ...

Where is some of the worlds priciest residential property? For week 22 of #MakeoverMonday we look at a World Economic Forum chart trying to answer that question. On first glance the chart is nice and clear, but is a tree map the right type of chart to use when we’re not looking at parts of a whole? A number of community members have suggested it is not, and for me that detail shouldn’t be left to the chart footnote just in case the chart is used in a standalone setting. The sort order of the areas isn’t super intuitive either, with the most expensive city in the top right. ...

How accurate were the Guardian Sports writers’ predictions for the 2017-18 English Premier League? According to this visualisation, which was picked for week 21 of makeover Monday, the predictions were not that great. I decided to have a play with removing inaccurate predictions; after all once you get one wrong you’ll end up with at least one other prediction wrong too right? E.g. getting first and second the wrong way around. I was intrigued to see if the Guardian had more of the sequence correct than it seemed at first glance. Arguably they did have more right – 11 was the number I got to. ...

I’m returning to #MakeoverMonday after a month or two off with family and travelling. After completing all 52 in 2017 I’m pretty relaxed about how many I participate in this year, and hope to pick up on some other community initiatives, like viz for social good. Anyway back to this weeks makeover… In week #13 the challenge was to makeover the first chart in this infographic about chocolate bar preferences in the UK. I enjoyed the original infographic and found the bump chart interesting. It took me a little while to reconcile that the bump chart plotted preferences across age brackets not years. I like the way the lack of data for some brands has been handled, although that does add to the complexity of the chart. So for my makeover I’ve simplified it down to simple lists of rankings. I’ve coloured the items by manufacturer as I think this tells the story about Cadbury more effectively for the audience. ...

Week 2: What attributes are seen as most preferable in a romantic partner: . Week 3: Distributions as a line chart similarly to one or two others, but within a tile map. Each tile shows the distribution relative to all other distributions. Shading highlights the higher proportions for a selected income bracket. I also experimented with a second chart per tile to act as a miniature x-axis and call out the selected income bracket to orientate the viewer, not so sure about this bit … I wanted to show the income bracket too but it was just too dense text-wise! There were a few tricks here – like using a dual axis with area chart to be able to show a different background colour for each tile. Feel free to download the workbook to take a look and let me know if there’s things that could be done more elegantly! ...

A whole new year of chart makeovers to look forward to! And this year the data is available via data.world too, with integration to a wider set of tools. We’re starting out with a look at per capita poultry consumption in the US since the 1960s based on data from the National Chicken Council; a nice clean line chart that tells the main story. The source data allows us to dive into a little more detail to expand upon the story. It was interesting to look at Turkey and seafood, and also to try to find equivalent data for plant-based proteins. ...