Week 11: Putting Everything together and Moving on to Tableau

We have learned almost everything there is to learn about infographics, now the hard part is putting everything together and actually applying it to real life applications.  Infographics need to be detailed and simple at the same time.  They need to be filled with data and valuable content yet also easily understandable and accessible to as many people as possible.  This is achievable but it requires a lot of knowledge, experience, and skill. 

Going a step beyond infographics, dashboards are the next step up from infographics.   Infographics are great marketing tactics and useful tools for businesses in that aspect, but dashboards take infographics to the next level.  Dashboards are more or less better for internal, or business to business use rather than business to consumer.  The reader has to have some general knowledge of the topic in order to understand the information presented by the dashboard, which also means that the creator of the dashboard needs to have some understanding of the data in order to create a good one.   This has been the hardest part for me in attempting to create a dashboard in Tableau.

I have given a bunch of examples of great websites and software to use when creating infographics in my previous blog posts.  I mentioned Tableau in my week 4 post about data visualization as it an amazing tool to use when creating dashboards.  I explained in week 4 that I did not have enough knowledge or understanding of the tool to properly explain it and that I needed some more time to learn how it works.  So, this week I did my best to try and dive deeper into Tableau and create a dashboard of my own.


https://us-east-1.online.tableau.com/#/site/infographicsbyries/views/TryingTableau/Dashboard1?:iid=2

Click on the link above to check out the dashboard that I created.  I used a sample data set that Tableau actually provides to its users.  I created three graphs.  They all show just about the same idea, the fact that GDP and CO2 emissions move simultaneously in global economies as well as the fact that China and the United States are the leaders in both GDP and CO2 emissions.  Given this, my dashboard shows just how important it is to choose the right graph because they all use the same data yet they all have a different impact on the viewer.  The "packed bubbles" graph, which I have added a visual of down below, gives a more general, simple conclusion, and the graph with a scroll bar gives a much more detailed example of the same thing.  Recalling back to the best practices for infographics, I said not to use scroll bars in infographics.  Dashboards are more data-driven so I think that it is okay to use scroll bars in this case, but I would still be wary and make sure that it is absolutely necessary. 



After the experiences with Tableau that I have had so far, I will say that it an amazing tool.  Although, it is very intimidating.  I look at Tableau as I would imagine someone who has never used excel before would look at it.  In both, there are so many useful functionalities and details that can be used to present data in incredibly innovative ways.  I have created a very very simple dashboard and in all honesty, it took me a decent amount of time.   Although, once you get the hang of it, the possibilities are endless.  Tableau really has everything figured out.  With every problem that I ran into when creating my dashboard, Tableau already had a solution, I just had to find it in the software.  Additionally, Tableau has an online version.  I used this to publish the link to my dashboard.  This feature is really beneficial.  If it did not exist, it would be very difficult to share the dashboards you create. 


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