There have been more and more excellent Tableau vizzes out there. There are part of them where I would tweak it in my way. It is far from a makeover though. Just some tweaks. And I would share the changes under a hashtag #TweakThursday. Hopefully, I can contribute some ideas to the community in viz design.

A recent Tableau Viz of the Day on tennis champion Novak Djokovic the King of the World by Ravi Mistry caught my attention. It is excellent in overall design! I like very much the fact that the main color matches the tone of Roland Garros clay courts. Yes, Novak just won his first French Open and completed his first Career Grand Slam (won all four major titles!). What a grandiose achievement!
There are some details I found maybe we can do differently. Below are the main tweaks I did:

1.The tournaments were not sorted nor aligned.

By having them sorted, we can easily count how many Australian Finals he has won or lost etc. The sorting may not be so obvious because I like to cluster the marks together per every round as in the original. I used a continuous pill Index() for the rescue. Open the workbook to see the details.

Also some of the rounds are missing because Novak lost early. We have to make up and hide those vacant data marks.

2.There seem a bit too many gridlines.

Gridlines gave us a sense of structure in the layout. But they are not the only way to show the structure. When the structure is already there, gridlines can become redundant.

For example, in the pivot table, the row bands already give us clear view of every row. So the gridlines are not necessary.

In the line chart, the lines are already separated between years. Thus the vertical lines are in excess.

You might have heard that a major makeover in Tableau 10 is removing the various gridlines on its Desktop interface and canvas. It exhibits a crisper interface with better aesthetics in my view. Note that aesthetics is always something subjective. So, please bear with me.

In the spirit of Tableau 10, I removed most of those gridlines.

3.In the line chart, the three players other than Novak are indistinguishable.

I created a custom color palette with 3 gray colors of different shades to represent the 3 other players. And, Novak is still in that bright orange clay color.

Here is the resulting viz. Click the picture to go to the interactive one.
That's my first #TweakThursday design. Your feedback is welcome. Hope to see alternative designs from others. At the end of the day, my wish is that we can learn from each other and upgrade our skills, much like the #MakeoverMonday exercises by Andy and Andy.

[Update 6/14/2016] 
4.Match data marks with context
This is a tennis story. It looks pertinent to use circle marks, just like the color scheme matching the clay court of Roland Garros.
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  1. This is a great idea #TweakThursday. Thanks million for sharing

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really like the small changes you made here Alex. They make the viz cleaner and easier to understand more quickly. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Andy! Your compliments are very much appreciated!

      Delete

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button. 

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

  • Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
  • Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

  • Go to the target dashboard
  • Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
  • Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
  • Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

  • Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager             
  • Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest. 
  • Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.  
  • The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help. 

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