It’s the fourth day of Dashboard Week and today our coaches decided to show some mercy on us. They gave us data that was already clean and easy to understand – Victoria Roads Data. It was very refreshing and fun to work on it, as we had more time to work on the dashboard itself and we had the opportunity to be creative.
Step 1
The first step, as always, was exploring the data and seeing what insights I wanted to show. I decided I wanted to focus on the location of the accidents on the streets (cross intersection, T-intersection, etc).
When I started building the charts, I realised that I started building a report, and not an interactive dashboard. So I decided to take a step back and see how creative I could become.
Step 2
A nice way to represent it would be a road image with points on it, showing the volume of accidents at a particular point. I found the image and looked up online how to generate X and Y coordinates on it in Tableau. You can find more details here.
Once I had the points I brought into my view the ‘Road Geometry’ as they call it. And placed the distinct count of accidents into size, to show where were happening the most accidents. This was the result:
Step 3
Afterwards, I wanted to add the maximum speed limit, the accident severity and the weather conditions. I searched online for icons and created the charts. I wanted the weather conditions to be on a particular location in the view, so I created an excel with X and Y coordinates and joined it with the main data set.
Step 4
After having all my charts, I placed them in the dashboard. I had to use many floating containers as otherwise, the layout wasn’t pretty. And here is the result.