Tableau Dashboards and Storytelling

Author's Introduction

Nabeela Polly has worked in a private commercial bank for around four and half years after completing her undergraduate studies in Finance. She was placed in the Credit Card Operations Department and her work responsibilities mainly included ensuring the proper execution of financial transactions in Card Management Software (TWCMS) and Core Banking software (Finacle), along with strategizing the risk mitigation in carrying out financial operational activities in accordance with Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and Central Bank guidelines. Currently, she is pursuing MBA and working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Illinois State University.

    Saurabh Shirgaokar is a marketing professional with 6 years experience in Digital Marketing. His assignments included planning and execution of digital campaigns, lead generation, content development, website maintenance, customer engagement, developing marketing collateral and handling a team of designers and tele-callers. He is an expert in sales support function, budget allocation, customer targeting, digital analytics and reporting, project planning, negotiation, event management, and ordination.   

Anamika Datta is currently doing MBA at Illinois State University with Business Analytics certification. She worked as a full-time Instructor in the Department of International Business at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She taught several undergraduate courses including microeconomic, macroeconomic, Foreign Exchange & International Banking and Legal & Regulatory Environment of Business. While teaching, she also involved in research and publication. Currently she has two publications and one under review. Besides, she is also working as Graduate Assistant in Finance, Insurance and Law Department at ISU.

    Al Zamil M.K has his undergraduate degree in accounting and marketing. He is very interested in the field of analytics, which is why he chose to concentrate on Business Analytics in his MBA. He is an Administrative Graduate Assistant at the College of Business, Illinois State University, and also has experience in creating complex models in excel, R program and Tableau. In addition to the Graduate Assistantship, Al Zamil also tutors undergrad students in accounting courses.  

Author's Review About the Course

Week-1

Week-1 starts with a quotation by a writer named Flannery O'Connor, "I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one." The instructor Hunter Whitney, uses that quotation to further point out that the foundational description of a story has three core connected elements (three Cs) which are context, challenge, and conclusion. He emphasizes the importance of creating meaningful stories by exploring mountains of data using the example of an investigative journalist. We found this part of the lecture insightful since it is very important to identify the meaningful patterns from data and explain them through the power of storytelling. In essence, he makes the lecture material interesting by presenting how Tableau-views, worksheets, and dashboards, can be used to present the story. Week-1 video lectures mostly educate on the who, what, why, and how behind the storytelling project. He further expands our thinking by focusing on the importance of considering the stakeholders and audience needs while designing the visualization. Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler. This can be taken as an important point when we are planning our visualization on Tableau. Week-1 ends with important questions like do you want to actively persuade your audience at a predetermined conclusion or alternatively? to help us understand that the most effective way to present a data story depends on the interplay of project requirements, resources, goals, and priorities. 

Week-2

During the video lectures in week-2, instructor Govind Acharya focuses on how to identify crucial KPI’s (Key Performance, Indicators) for an organization and provides multiple tips on the design of the dataset. He states that designing KPI’s in a way that it serves strategic needs of the organization, and making it measurable and quantifiable would help organization to find deeper insights. We found his methods of identifying meaningful information from data useful because the hardest part of data analytics is gathering right information. Moreover, he talks about presenting information in a well-ordered manner in-order to create an indulging visualization. The most interesting part in week-2 is where instructor Govind Acharya uses raw data set from Wikipedia and converts it into a clean information that can be used for Tableau story-telling. Data can be obtained from multiple sources, however, it takes a lot of effort from the side of the analyst to clean the data to a usable form. Overall we enjoyed the contents in week-2. 

Week-3

This lecture starts with a discussion on six best practices of dashboard design which include choosing metrics based on why they matter, keeping it visual, making it interactive, keeping the data up to date, making it simple to access and use and finally avoiding mistakes. Govind Acharya mentioned that Tableau's bet features align well these practices. In the next session, instructor showed how to apply hierarchies, actions, filters and parameters within tableau. Filtering helps audience to navigate various pieces of dashboards. He showed how can analysts iteratively filter down to information that they need. While discussing the techniques, he mentioned that before making filtering, it is essential to understand the data implicitly and to include the limitations of data in the dashboard. Finally, he discussed how to uncover the story in the data and how to frame the story. While he was showing all the techniques of designing dashboards, he emphasized to follow the best practices and to avoid mistakes by not maintaining these principles.

Week-4

During the video lectures in week-4, the instructor focuses on concepts and techniques to create compelling storytelling in tableau. He further focuses on the fact that cognitive biases are tendencies to think and make judgements based on our own personal set of perspective experiences and filters, and that may not be reflective of the true situation. Next, he talks about finding the right balance and modulating emotion through color and language and other design choices, which is a part of exercising data story telling skills. Framing and formatting a data story is an art because the strongest visual element may capture the attention of our audience first rather than the intended starting point of our story, so we must ensure that the framing and formatting of our story should clearly indicate a designated starting point. Further the author dwells on how to setup a story, creating crucial points in the story, creating interactive points in the story, and finally telling the story in the stories. The most interesting part of Week 4 is how the instructor shows us example and walks us through the different process, which make the story telling process in tableau a convincing one. Plus he has also covered some interesting real-world examples to explain the process which is really interesting.

About the Course

Course Name: Creating Dashboards and Storytelling with Tableau

Instructor: Govind Acharya and Hunter Whitney

The course “Creating Dashboards and Storytelling with Tableau” is about Visual Analytics with Tableau where we will create dashboards and use Storypoints to produce a powerful story within our data that will leave a lasting impression with the audience. Throughout the course participants will gain knowledge about data visualization, storyboarding and, tableau software. This will help participants to learn how to balance the goals of different stakeholders with the needs of end-users using advanced functions within Tableau and be able to structure and organize the story for maximum impact.

 Learning:

• Combine the data and follow the best practices to present your story
• Create calculated fields for KPIs to build a figure that will be used to measure progress in the data
• Assemble a dashboard
• Analyze concepts and techniques for compelling storytelling with data

Skills from the Course

Course Content

Week-1

      1. Define the story 

      2. Basic framework building for a story

      3. Determine the who, what, why, and how of the story

      4. Analyze the stakeholders and audience to find the right story in the data

      5. Combine the data and follow the best practices to present the story

Week-2

1. What is KPI (Key Performance Indicators)?
2. Three Components of KPI
3. Important KPI design tips
4. Importance and relevance of data cleaning

Week-3

1. Review Tableau's six best practices for dashboard design
2. Assemble a dashboard
3. Apply hierarchies, actions, filters, and parameters within Tableau
4. How to uncover the story in the data and frame the story

Week-4

1. Concepts and Techniques for compelling storytelling
2. Avoiding unintentional false narratives
3. Impact of neuroscience on stories, audience engagement, and decision drivers
4. Impact of design and textual elements affecting the emotional tone of a story
5. Frame and Format Data Story with help of a design checklist
6. Awareness of unconscious biases impacting data storytelling process

Conclusion

Overall, we found this course to be useful for people who would like to pursue a career in analytics and data visualization. Various departments in the organization has to effectively communicate with each other with data available. Using data visualization software, interdepartmental communications becomes more effective and coherent to professionals who does not have experience in other departments. 

Who will be benefitted?

By doing this course professionals and students can learn more about advanced topics on data visualization like applying hierarchies, filter, and parameter. Thus, those who have a basic or preliminary exposure to tableau will be benefited most.

Why should one take the course?

Tableau is one of the most popular data visualization tools in the field of business intelligence. One should take the course because it can quickly create insightful and impactful visualizations in an interactive and colorful way. The use is not just limited to creating traditional graphs and charts. Even the non technical users can build customized dashboards to present a broad spectrum of information.

What is missing in the course?

The course is advanced level and there is more theory about tableau which is a good foundation, but there should have been more practical examples. Another point missing in the course is advanced techniques which are important in Tableau for story boarding. Finally, the course is missing the most important thing, which is the Capstone Project.