Olympic Medals

Here's another ReViz! This time Alex Duke through down the gauntlet of using Olympic medal data and came up with this Viz of the Day. Also Dash Davidson had asked me if I would help Tableau create some Olympic themed vizzes that could be used for an exhibition. I cheated a bit because Alex's data did not have 2012 medals, so I went and found them to be up to date.

So I decided to go for a pretty simple approach that could be printed out and used as a static image. I've also always been a fan of medal data that takes into account the size of a countries population for context, so I built in a switch to flip between total medals and medals per million people. If you are printing these out, you could place the two versions side by side.



Anyway, here it is:

Simple requirements gathering questions for dashboard design

Today I gave a bit of a tutorial to my team at work* about how to develop effective dashboards and I included a section on how I like to gather requirements from the people I'm making the dashboard for. I basically have a framework of simple questions, that once complete should give you the bulk of what you need to know to build an effective and useful dashboard.

I thought I'd share a version of it here. Please bear in mind of course that this is definitely a simplification - good requirements gathering is a conversation and entails a good deal of understanding of the subject and data - what I'm focussing on here is simply the content/structure of the dashboard.

So here's what I do, I ask questions. I definitely do not ask 'what do you want to see?' or 'what numbers do you need?' as these open ended questions often lead to over loaded monstrosities that somehow don't get to the heart of the matter. And I don't get people to fill out forms, because that's boring.

Here are some of the questions I ask, and how they can help me design a dashboard. I hope they help you too!

 *did I mention I got a new job? I'm now working in Product Insights at Spotify, yay!