As Day 2 of dashboard week almost come to the end, we have finished our second dashboard – Sports Day, within a limited timeframe. We were given the datasets about different sports and need to find interesting insights from the numbers. I picked the Winter Olympic historical data to analyze because I myself am a big fan of Figure Skating and Speed Skating. The datasets cover the Winter Olympic Medal Winners from 1924 to 2014, with their name, countries and events. During my exploratory data analysis, I found out that the dataset has limited columns to look at , which is very different from our previous experience that the data are usually quite wide and we need to create schema to understand the relationship between multiple datasets. Thus here I will be focusing on some of the challenges and approaches that I have come across in today’s sports project.
1. Decide Your Business Question and Time Boxing
Even with limited columns of data, we can get lost in the information. It is especially important to come up with the main question the dashboard is going to answer before starting putting charts together to keep you focused on the problem and create logic flow among the charts in the dashboard.
2. Understand the columns and create measures and calculations to answer the questions.
Based on the questions to be answered, think carefully and creatively about the calculations to put numbers together to make sense of the number, such as calculating ratios, creating Booleans based on the categorical data to use the numbers in diverse ways and to explore different types of charts to find the ones that best tell the story.
3. Show your dashboard to others and seek feedback
As we are developing our dashboard, we often get too close to our data and charts that prevents us to spot some improvements to make. I find it very beneficial to show the dashboard to someone else and try tell the data story to seek for feedback. Very often I can get valuable feedback in design, insights and formatting from my coaches and cohorts.
If you are interested in Winter Olympics and Dashboard Design, here is the link to my dashboard:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/juliet5263/viz/WhereDoestheWinnersComeFrom/Dashboard1
3 Tips for Dashboard Development – Dashboard Week Day II
This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.
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