#TweakThursday 30: Dimension Matters

In the latest #MakeoverMonday project of Week11 2017, the little data set is exciting, because it is about orgasm. In spite of its small size, people created great vizzies based on the data set.

There are two dimensions in the data: gender and sexual orientation. I found that the gender dimension is emphasized throughout most vizzies, while the other dimension is not equally considered.

For example this one by Andy Kriebel (thanks to whom the #MakeoverMonday project is born), where the upper part is men and the lower part is women. The sexual orientation dimension is not clearly showing. I understand Andy is doing a global sorting on percentage. That is ignoring all the dimensions within. The resulting order just happens to show men on top.

So I tweaked it a little bit, put it into the 2-dimensional grid and here is the result.

Now viewers can easily compare the percentage horizontally (sexual orientation) and/or vertically (gender). The global ordering only provide partial information about the data. We still like to see the comparison within each dimension such as hetero men vs women, hetero men vs gay etc.

My intention is to emphasize visualizing the data set based on the inherent dimensions. The dimensions provide the basis and the structure for a fair comparison.

Voila, that's the tweak of the week.

BTW, here is my submission of this week's #MakeoverMonday project. In the viz, I try to show visually the following:

Global maximum and minimum
Comparison per gender dimension
Comparison per sexual orientation dimension

(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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Vizible Difference

In search of data visualization excellence

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

2. Create an show/hide button

3. Add annotations

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