Lesson number one in collecting your own data…make sure you’re collecting the RIGHT data!
After spending several evenings collecting the data for my viz, I went back to the website to finish off and realised that the map showed a pin in Alaska instead of in the Arctic Ocean.
DAMN!!!
Instead of scrapping it and starting again, I decided to own my mistake though and create a viz about the daylight hours of North Pole, Alaska.
Viz Number One
I’ve been looking for an excuse to try a radial line chart for a while now, so I’d set my heart on creating one to show the number of daylight hours for my viz. I followed a blog post by the Trig Kings themselves, the Flerglage Twins. I saw their talk at TC19 and they made trigonometry seem simple! I’d highly recommend it.
Once I’d created the viz, I just had to create the time difference calcs to show the length of time in hours and minutes for the tooltip.
Hours : FLOOR(SUM([Time end]-[Time start])*24)
Mins : ROUND((SUM([Time end]-[Time start])*1440)-([Duration (hours)]*60))
I quite like this viz – I think it kind of looks like a heart…but I’d collected data about daylight, night and twilight times, so I wanted to incorporate them somehow.
Viz Number Two
I knew that this wouldn’t be a simple viz to create though…after all, the radial line chart is just that…a LINE chart! So I knew I needed to create something that looked like a bar, without actually being a bar.
Luckily for me, I’m not the first to want to try this. And even luckier for me, Luke Stanke wrote an excellent blog to explain just what to do.
Now I love this view, but it looks a little bit strange when the clocks change so I added labels to highlight it and explain what was going on to the viewer.
I couldn’t decide which of these views I preferred, so I decided to try a few more styles and show a few different options for visualising this data.
Viz Number Three
The Stacked Radial Chart looks like a bar chart that has been curved around a circle, so I wanted to create a flat stacked bar chart to show the difference. This is what was used on the timeanddata.com website and I loved it. It made the data more digestible than a list of times. Again, I added the labels to show the clocks changing and added the hours and minutes on the tooltip.
I like a stacked bar chart, but it can be difficult to see the trends of individual phases. So next up was a simple line chart (thanks to Lorna Brown for the suggestion!)
Viz Number Four
I needed to restructure the data for this view to include zeros for missing data. Otherwise, it’s a simple line chart!
Finally, I love seeing calendars in Tableau. It’s one of the first things I learnt how to build, but had only ever displayed one month at a time.
Viz Number Five
It would have defeated the purpose of this viz if I’d only shown one month at a time and I found a great blog post by Hanna Nykowska that showed how to get a 12 month calendar into one view. I had to tweak it slightly to get four columns, but otherwise, the steps were really easy to follow and I really liked the trick of using row and column dividers to create the space between months.
Home Page
The last thing to do was to pull them all together. I wanted to highlight all five vizzes on one page and allow the user to select one to explore so I used images of each dashboard as navigation buttons.
The trouble is, I also wanted to have a map to show where North Pole is and have a bit of a blurb about the city. I was playing with the layout when I remembered collapsible containers! They are a great way to add extra detail for the user to find and explore. I changed the images to expand or collapse the container to match my colour scheme and added a call out to it in the blurb under my dashboard title.
I’ve not shown all of the tabs on Tableau Public because I think it takes a bit of the magic away and adds a bit of clunk to the overall look.
I’m quite pleased with this workbook and I learned a lot along the way! So thank you to the amazing #datafam for writing up such excellent blogs that I could follow.
What’s next?
It’s over to Adam for next week’s choice! I can’t wait to see what he’s got in store, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled on his Tableau Public profile and his blog to see what he creates.
Tales of a Data Nerd 