Today was the fifth and final day of the dashboard week. If you’re unfamiliar with dashboard week, it is a week where the data schoolers in training have to build 5 dashboards along with 5 related blogs in 5 days. So that’s 1 dashboard + 1 blog a day. Every day the topic and requirements are provided in the morning and we have till the end of the day to finish our work.
Dashboard Week Day 5 Topic
Today we were given US 500 Cities Survey Data to work with. The brief was just the usual with a slight twist. Today is the final day of dashboard week and also the last day of the working week. Here’s the brief:
- Create a visualisation using the US 500 Cities Survey Data
- Supplement it with whatever you want
- Tableau & Alteryx use is allowed
- FINISH BY 3:00 PM
So we only had a few hours to finish the viz. I also challenged myself to finish the viz AND the blog within the time limit. And I have 11 minutes left as of now to finish the blog. No pressure.
My Approach
I was mentally prepared to move fast today. So on receiving the dataset, I quickly put it into Alteryx and tried making sense of it. The dataset is fairly clean and there’s a lot of interesting information in it. But I wanted to supplement it with a lot more data that I knew was out there. And since I am short on time, not only did I have to find these supplementary datasets quickly, I had to be able to clean them quickly as well.
I already had a story in mind. I looked into US consumer expenditure data yesterday and found an interesting insight on the rising cost of healthcare in the US. So I decided to connect the dots and focus on the topic of healthcare with the new dataset.
I decided to include supplementary data on income across the states, voting patterns (trust me there is a correlation) and access to healthcare.
After all the data was joined and cleaned, I decided to quickly more to Tableau and start visualising my story. I decided to go heavy on maps as I often do. I included a scatter plot which is a great way to show a correlation between the different measures I was intending to show. I also ended the viz with two comparative maps.
Click this link to be taken to the viz. Also, below is a screenshot of a segment of the viz.
