Why did I participate?
First of all, let me tell you that I like to participate to the IronViz competition, not because I have any chance to win nor I am interested by the prices myself (nota bene :I have even stated on my viz that in case of ranking on the top 3 to give the prices to Animal charities).
The real reason why I participate is because it force me to achieve something on a limited time. Do not get me wrong, part of my work consists on doing dashboard for others on a limited time. But when I viz in Tableau Public, it is a never ending story, and I have often to force myself to finish or at least publish a viz after a certain amount of time.
I do not have time to participate on time on any other #datafam initiative on a regular basis, but somehow I participated to every ironviz since 2017 (date I discoved about it). And I always learn something on the process because I am my own stakeholder.
My attempts are certainly messy and clamsy but I am always amazed by how my original idea transformed itself into a viz.
What is the original idea ?
For this new Tableau context, about Heath and well being, I wanted to give a more positive approach to the current Covid situation, and I searched for a database bringing a new light. My friend @gabybouret helped me to find interesting articles about the reduction of the CO2 Emissions and I just started.
Additionally, I cared about what to give a alt text descriptions for explaining the images for accessibility and I concentrated myself for this submission on the analysis ( occupational hazard) and story telling.
This post will explain the navigation for the story telling and the drill down on the maps techniques.
Show / Hide containers to display different views
Recently I discovered very useful use cases for the show/hide containers. On a previous viz functional dashboards I used an eye image to show/hide some worksheets to be able to mock a Powerpoint slides. By clicking on the different eyes, I can show how a dashboard transform when applying the following steps.
For this submission, I used a slider image to display a different visual, it is a variante of having a parameter controling the chart to display.
- you create two sliders on powerpoint, for instance:
- you drag the worksheet that you want always on your dashboard as titled
- you drag then on top a floating containers containing the worksheet that you want to display occasionally
- on the floating container you right click and choose "hide/show button"
- when the button appear click on edit button
on item shown choose one of the slider and click on item hidden and choose the other one.
Original view :
Map with the +/- signs to zoom
- Create a global map
- Create a detail view for US
- Create a + view for US ( "+" is added as a text)
- Create a - view for US ("-" is added as a text)
- Create a parameter "counter level"
- A calculated field increment US : [counter level]+1
- A calculated field decrement US : [counter level]-1
- Add a parameter action " Increment US" on the "US + view", selecting the target parameter "counter level" and the field "increment US"
- Add a parameter action "decrement US" on the "US - view", using "counter level" and the field "decrement US"
Then it is just question to add filters to remove the views on the dashboard depending of parameter "counter level" value.
- I kept the global views including the + views when the parameter=0
- when the parameter=1 : the US views are kept including the - US view
- when the parameter=-1 the China views are kept including the - China view ( it is the same technique for China).
What about the titles ?
Here there is another design point, that I haven't talked about. When you filter out a view based on a value, you usually have the title kept and the view is blank. To avoid it but still have some titles, I used two ways.
- On the map the white rectangle is an annotation, which will have the advantage to display the date of the animation
- On the Gant Chart on the right, the title "when did confinement level 3 start" is a sentence between quote I put in column .
Note : The bar on the map indicating the number of province, is not an annotation, but a location used to displayed dynamically the number of provinces by confinement level
Navigation ?
The last original part of this visualisation is the navigation part. The navigation displayed is an inspiration from a blog post by @keith_dykstra, where they explain a more complicated technique used on a fantastic visualisation on Spotify data link.
| story point | x | y | ||
| 1 | 1300 | 760 | ||
| 2 | 1300 | 2225 | ||
| 3 | 1300 | 3275 | ||
| 4 | 1300 | 4250 | ||
| 5 | 1300 | 5200 |
- A parameter counter that will increment by clicking
- 2 calculated fields "display x" and "display y" that will appear also by clicking if we reach a certain level on our story
ELSE MIN([x])
END
ELSE MIN([y])
END
- A calculated field to increment called index = [counter]+1
- A calculated field "Shape" to control the shape of the graph, and indicate to the end user that he can still drill down
ELSEIF [story point]=5 then "end"
ELSEIF [counter] = [story point] then'Plus'
END
Then you need to create a parameter action incrementing the story by clicking on the story line view, the index field will control the value of the parameter ( here increment by 1).
Then you just need to control the display of your views depending of the values of the parameter.
For instance the views below the title " Did we enjoy a better air now" has to be visible when the story line >3, so you need to create a field for every dataset for every step of your data story, for instance :
show story line 3 =[counter]>3
Again take care of the title of the views, we do not want that they are displayed until the end user do not click on a +. I used here the techniques displayed on the previous point ( using annotation or column text).
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post,
Rati