Tableau Dashboard Design Tips For 2023
There is a reason why Tableau Dashboard is synonymous with storytelling. Every number and every statistic has a story to tell. Presenting those numbers in a way that reveals the story behind them should be the mission of every Data Analyst who works with data visualisation. Tableau Software offers a wealth of flexibility to let you design dashboards in a way that makes the greatest impact on the viewer. In this article, we will share with you some exclusive tips on how to design attractive and impactful Tableau Dashboards.
Designing Tableau Dashboards: Tips and Tricks
Here are some Tableau design tips for 2023-
Highlight the Most Important Bars in the Bar Chart
Our first tip is more of a fundamental guide for Tableau. When you create a bar chart in a Tableau implementation by dragging and dropping rows and columns, you get a chart that has a uniform colour. By default, you will see the bars in blue.
However, you can highlight the highest and lowest bar in two distinct colours to make the bar chart more impactful. For example, you can colour the bars denoting the highest and lowest profit in blue and red, respectively. Colour coding enables people to make sense of the bar chart efficiently. One little caveat, don’t jazz up the bar chart with too many colours.
Sort the Chart
Another Tableau Dashboard tip pertaining to the bar chart. When you use Tableau to build a bar chart, your Tableau implementation displays the chart in an unsorted way. You can organise the bar chart by displaying bars in either ascending or descending order. This will make the bar chart aesthetically pleasing as well as easy to digest.
Minimalism Is the Need of the Hour
Our attention span is decreasing year on year. This trend will continue in 2023 as well. If the dashboard of your Tableau implementation is cluttered with too much information, people won’t notice what you want them to notice.
If you want people to focus on what your dashboard primarily shows:
- Remove all the distractions.
- Remember, the ultimate aim of Tableau is to display complex data in a digestible format.
- Don’t let your designs come in the way of Data Analysis.
Here’s an example of a minimalist Tableau license dashboard that still shows all the information. (Source Tableau Public)
First Overview, Then Zoom In
An effective Tableau Software dashboard gives viewers a bird’s eye view of the data. This gives them an idea of the bigger picture. Once they see the anomaly or something out of the ordinary, they would like to go deeper and probe that anomaly. So your dashboard should have given an overview first and then a detailed analysis of the anomaly.
Use Pie Chart Sparingly
2023 will be the year of clear information with as much transparency as possible. Pie charts are incapable of showing the difference between various data if the difference between the numbers is small. Human eyes will have difficulty judging which part of the pie is larger.
You can use Pie Chart to focus on that data that is too big or too small compared to other data.
2023 Will Be a Year of Disparities. Display Them with Tableau
Every year, we are becoming acutely aware of gender and financial disparities. In 2023, we will see the revelation of more such disparities. Displaying such disparities with Tableau Software can impact the viewer the most.
As of 2021, only 41 of the total Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs. No matter how you write it, if you can show this data as a visualisation, it can have the biggest impact. (Source: Tableau Public)
Bonus Tips
- Keep the usage of 3D elements to a minimum.
- The popularity of flat design will continue in 2023. Leverage it.
- Don’t forget the text. Explain your data visualisation further with some texts.
- Highlight the important textual data by using background colours, bold font or underlining.
- If you are working with too many line graphs, focus on one line graph at a time and use greyish colour for other line graphs.
Bottomline
The Tableau implementation gives you an open canvas with all the paints and brushes. Use your creativity to come up with stunning visualisations. Just follow the Tableau design tips for 2023 as described above to keep your designs aligned with the best practices. Happy charting!