Visual Analytics Best Practices

This course teaches you to design visualisations that effectively share information and insights
with others both inside and outside of your organisation.

ABOUT THIS COURSE

If you’re looking to strengthen your understanding of visual best practices, then this is the course for you.

The course starts with an understanding of what visual analytics is. The outcome is to design
visualisations so they inform without misleading by using the right chart types based on the
underlying data and the story that needs to be told.

The course will help you identify the most appropriate chart types to answer specific questions, apply best practices and considerations for a variety of chart types and how to effectively use chart types to answer specific questions.

Audience

Tableau users and analysts.

Duration: 1 day

Prerequisites: None

COURSE CONTENT

What is Visual Analytics?

Lesson

We will show you how to best create data visualisations, as well as different types of visualisation and aspects of Data Integrity (typical political tricks!)

Outcome

Your understanding of what constitutes visual analytics and see the best and worst things that you can do.

Start with Questions

Lesson

A very important part of your visualisation is to understand what you are trying to achieve, what is the purpose, who is the audience and what value does it bring to your organisation.

Outcome

You will realise that the right questions will lead to good visualisations of your data and that your analysis will be used to fuel exploration of your data and help drive business decisions.

Choosing the Right Chart Type

Lesson

In this session you will see how choosing the right chart type depends on your data and what information you are trying to show to your audience.

Lab

During the Follow Me session you will create a:

Time Comparison chart
Comparison and Ranking chart
Correlation chart
Distribution chart
Composition chart
Geographical data chart

The exercises include creating a histogram, area chart and dual axis map.

Outcome

You will understand that depending on your data and what type of story you are trying to tell will depict which chart type is right for each occasion.

Effective Visualisations

Lesson

Creating effective views requires effort, intuition, attention to detail and trial and error, however understanding pre-attentive attributes and how to use them in your visualisations will assist.

Lab

The Follow Me session is used to improve the views by adding preattentive attributes and creating a help icon.

The exercises include using colour, size, opacity, borders, changing to a better colour palette, modifying the title and editing the tooltips.

Outcome

By understanding the different types of preattentive attributes you will create more effective views.

Creating Effective Dashboards

Lesson

Here we look at a number of ways to ensure we create effective dashboards using some time honoured techniques.

Lab

To improve the readability, changing scrunched views, removing double encoding and removing change blindness we will use a Follow Me session.

For the exercise you will modify a dashboard so that it is more effective from a usability perspective.

Outcome

This will help you to create great dashboards, from a design, creation and formatting perspective.

General Guidelines

Lesson

Here we look at general guidelines to assist in best practices around your dashboards and visualisations from both a design and implementation perspective.

Lab

The Follow Me session includes adding cascading filters to a dashboard and adding interactivity through highlight actions.

The final exercise uses your new found knowledge to change an existing dashboard and make improvements.

Outcome

These guidelines will assist you in creating great visualisations and get the most out of your dashboards.

Tell Me, I’ll Forget;
Show Me, I’ll Remember;
Let Me Do It, I’ll Understand

Scheduled Courses

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