Ben Jones of Tableau Software, the author of the book Communicating Data with Tableau, asked me if I can tweak his recent viz on the 50+ goals club of international soccer.
It is quite an honor and a challenge! Ben's viz is already excellent. I would try to add some bells and whistles in my own taste.

The main chart above is a scatter plot. Some time ago, Ben had a great article on creating scatter plot with lateral histograms. (It was called marginal histogram. Somehow, I like the word lateral better.) It is based on a design by Iron Viz Champion Shine Pulikathara.

Scatter plot is a two dimensional way of calibrating the distribution of data. As a complement, it has been a custom for people to add lateral histograms to the scatter plot. They help us see the one-dimensional distributions, which can give us more insights along either of the dimensions.

There are multiple ways to design the lateral distribution chart. Please go to Ben's article to see two variants. In the commentary, I mentioned a third with histogram +  box plot (see tutorial). Here I added it to the viz. Click the image to play with the interactive version.
In summary, my tweaks are as follows:
- Added lateral histograms + box plots on both Caps and International Goals.
- Instead of using Size for [Goals per Match] which doesn't seem expressive, I created a lollipop chart for it.
- Minimized some of the font size because the descriptive text is quite static.
- Minimized the filters whose usage may not be high.
- The key is to make the subject stand out.
- Lowered the contrast a bit by using a gray background.
- Added color to emphasize the variables in the tooltips.

Postscript

 Recently scatter plot has been really hot. In the space of less than a month, 3 vizzies of the day are based on scatter plot. One of them is using Shine's design as template which includes lateral distribution charts. I would try to add lateral distribution charts to all of them.
July 12:
June 29:
June 17:
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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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