You are now officially warned – anyone using red-green contrasting colors can expect a serious whupping from the viz police. Same image using blue-orange diverging palette So, what’s the big deal? Here is a snippet of a red-green heat map from a popular Tableau Public visualization. I’ll focus on red-green colorblindness as 7% of American men either cannot distinguish red from green or they see red and green differently from most people (Note that only 0.4% of women are so affected. Once you visit this web site I guarantee you will never use red and green as contrasting / diverging colors. Never Use Red and Green as Contrasting Colors We’ll discuss this in the section on Usability below, but first let’s look at what color combinations to avoid at all costs. While you might think this is a tough constraint it turns out that being forced to work with a smaller canvas often results in dashboards that are easier for people to figure out how to use than larger dashboards. Whenever I publish interactive visualizations I hope that other bloggers pick up my viz feeds and embed my work in their blogs and web pages, but I’ve had enough of my work mangled at this point that I try very hard not to create dashboards that are wider than 650 pixels (As a general rule I shoot for a width of 625 pixels). Viz designed for a wide screen and not a narrow blog post There are many things one must take into account when designing good dashboards (colors, fonts, layout, etc.) but for this discussion I’m going to focus on the following elements.Īctually, it’s the width that matters and in a moment we’ll see why you will tempt fate if you create a dashboard that is wider than 650 pixels.īut first, let’s look at just why you have to worry about this in the first place.Įvery Tableau Public visualization has a Share button like the one shown below. Note: Andy Cotgreave recently addressed some of these same issues (see his blog post) and will explore how to create exemplary Tableau Public dashboards at the upcoming Tableau Customer Conference in Las Vegas in October. In this blog post I will share some of the things I’ve learned along the way to attract viewers and engage them in my stories. I have a lot of experience in this area having created many dashboards I thought were brilliant but left people flummoxed and uninspired. In fact, too many Tableau Public visualizations I’ve seen are both ugly and confusing. While Tableau excels at helping people explore data and turn information into insights, it is still all too easy to create dashboards that neither please the eye nor enlighten the mind. I am consumed by doing what I can to make sure that my Tableau visualizations (both public and for clients) are, well, consumed. Some thoughts on Size, Color, Usability, and Engagement
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