Dashboard Week has begun!!!!
This was a week that I was really excited for as I’ve really been wanting time to practice making dashboards and this is the perfect week to begin doing that. The challenge for day 1 was to create a dashboard using LA crime data. You can find the dataset here if you would like to try this challenge yourself. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/susant4learning/crime-in-los-angeles-data-from-2020-to-present
You are given ultimate freedom in dashboard week, but I wanted to set myself a challenge. I have decided that I want to focus on design this week and make the dashboards visually appealing. In the past I have used a simple container layout, and they just look like a bunch of charts thrown onto a page. I wanted it to look like I have properly designed these dashboards. I am also going to try to not work on my dashboards outside of work as I want to push myself to make great dashboards in the limited time. My dashboard for day 1 was created in Tableau and I used a tool called Figma to create the background. I used it for the first time today and it worked out well. I recommend checking it out if you, like me, want to make your dashboards look better and you struggle with design. I didn’t end up using Alteryx today as the only data cleaning I required was to clean the date fields and they also had a standard time of 12:00:00 in all rows and was useless to me.
As I began today, after I noticed that the data was clean enough for me to start using it, I searched for a story. I struggled with this, and it was difficult to find one in the short period of time. So, at around 10:30 I forced myself to pick a story out of the ones that I had brainstormed. They were comparing crimes that happened at night vs during the day or doing the same but for gender instead of time of day. I found these to be quite basic, but I didn’t want to waste any more time searching for a more interesting story. I chose to compare the crime statistics for men and women. I knew that the graphs would be quite easy to make, and that formatting and design would be my biggest issue.
Once I had settled on a story, I began designing the dashboard. I searched on Tableau Public to see how other people have tackled similar data and most of them used the layout of a business style dashboard. This made me want to try something different and use a more infographic type design. The victim gender column in the dataset had around 5 different options, however, for simplicity I decided to just look at men and women. With this information, I split my dashboard down the middle with opposing colours on each side and having the same charts on both sides. I used the opposite sides’ colours for the actual charts to have some contrast. I will provide the link below to my dashboard. Stay tuned to see the four more dashboards that I will be making this week.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/mitchell.bliesner/viz/LACrimeAnalysis_16907983731690/LACrimeAnalysis
I’ve also attempted making a vlog as my coach has asked us to start creating blogs. I’d appreciate if you viewed it. It is my first attempt, I will definitely be practicing more so I become more natural in front of a camera. Thank you.
https://www.loom.com/share/d42898012029402caef403ec575d873d
In the video I describe how I updated my dashboard, I’ll also show that below as well.
