My take on building a Dashboard and how I started my Tableau journey - Ajay Vishnu Addala

 Honoured to receive the Top Data Visualization Voice badge from LinkedIn! 🌟

My take on Dashboards:

The post shows a glimpse of before and after snapshots of my dashboard. I like starting old school on a piece of paper. I believe the first step in designing any dashboard is to understand our target audience. I put myself in the shoes of my target audience and list down what major KPIs and trends they would like to track and understand. Then, I start with a rough dashboard sketch, where I place the KPIs and visuals. I only worry about which visual to use at this stage if I am very particular. 

                                 

Before I start my visuals on Tableau, I decide on a color palette. I keep it simple with 2 primary colors and 2 secondary colors and only exceed that if necessary. The colour palette can be specific or occasion-specific. Once I start my visuals, I will remember that I will always make the visuals simple. The visuals in a dashboard should be explanatory and not exploratory in a dashboard. That is the reason I use simple visuals to depict. With time and practice, I improved in choosing the right visual (there is still much more to learn). Then comes the editing. I learned from the community to stay in the visual in the default setting. One impressive feature of Tableau is that everything you see on the screen is editable. So, I constantly edit the background, font, alignment, and labels to suit my color palette and dashboard design. 

Then comes the placement of all the sheets in the final dashboard. This can be done promptly using containers (which I learnt through the community!). Based on the size and visibility of the visual, we can rearrange the placements in a way that looks best for the eye. The general tendency of humans is to see a dashboard from the top left corner. So, I place my major KPIs in that position. My recent and favourite learning from the community is to edit the tooltips! This feature in Tableau is fantastic, as it allows me to add a lot of value to my dashboard and convey a proper story to my audience. 

The final and most crucial part is to seek feedback. I sent out my final dashboard to a few of the community members and my friends for review. I believe this is a very important step because when I create a dashboard, I feel I did everything in the best possible way and cannot identify the flaws. Only when I seek feedback I understand the issues that can be concerning. Once I gather all the perspectives and feedback, I make the final changes to the dashboard before publishing it.

My take on getting started with Data Visualization:

I have had the opportunity to work both on Power BI and Tableau. In my personal opinion, I prefer to work on Tableau as I feel I have more freedom to create visuals the way I want them.

If you are a student, Tableau offers a one-year free Tableau Desktop subscription! You can search for Tableau for students online, and you will find the resources. That is how I started my Tableau journey at Rutgers Business School. Tableau Public is a great place to learn and contribute. This is a place for everyone, from beginners to skilled professionals. Thousands of visuals are available; the best part is that most are free to download and learn. This is one place I always check out for inspiration on any of my projects. 

Andy Kriebel and Tim are some YouTube channels I follow for Tableau help. And the best practice is to keep working on the visuals and dashboards. Even the experts started from scratch with basic visuals. So, it is always important to take the first step! We must come out of the imposter syndrome, showcase our work, and seek feedback. Our initial work may be essential and could be better-looking compared to the visuals by the experts. But all that doesn't matter, and all that matters is to keep working on our visuals and be better than our previous visuals.

Join the Tableau User Groups! Tableau has many user groups; one can be in the same city or region. Stay posted on community activities and attend events. You can also choose to attend virtual events from other communities abroad. The meetings will be very informative and helpful for everyone. These will be helpful in both learning and networking.

Make sure you post your work on Tableau Public and LinkedIn! These are unique places to build your portfolio and seek feedback from the community. I decided to delete my initial visuals on Tableau Public. However, in one of the user group sessions, Tableau experts suggested waiting to do that when recruiters see our work and check how our work has transformed with time. Posting your work regularly and seeking feedback from the community dramatically helps. Connect with Tableau experts on LinkedIn and Tableau Public and seek their feedback. Most of them are very kind and helpful. There is a fantastic community built up that learns and helps each other. 

So, what's stopping you! Let's start vizzing!