One-year-on Part IV: US Housing Affordability
Hi everyone, I am writing a series of blogs where I redesign my very first Tableau Public visualisations. I have already remade my first three – if you’re interested, have a look at my recap blogs on the data school blog (https://bit.ly/39PYr0B). Now that I have finished my training I am aiming to keep up this series on The Information Lab blog.
Firstly, I want to recap my latest reviz project (https://bit.ly/2tK5RBX), I took my my initial viz…
And built this…
Mainly I’ve focused on making the story clear. I chart population dependency directly rather than forcing the user to infer the relationship when reading the chart. I have used chart face annotations to bring some context to the ratios rather than simply quoting the metric. Putting the two halves of the dashboard side-by-side vertically stretches the dependency ratio chart, making the increase clearer.
I have cut out the race breakdown, which is uninformative for the story I am telling. I replaced it with a population pyramid which is more relevant.
My fourth #justrevizit:
Next up, I will be redesigning a viz on housing affordability in the US:
My initial thoughts:
- This dashboard was a significant improvement on my other first vizzes however…
- The two sets of bar charts, which show affordability (median income/median house price) have too many data points. I allowed users to highlight cities by hovering over states on the central map/table. However, by not showing every city at once the viz would be less busy.
- Similarly, the table below the map which shows the most important information is a bit lost among the bars.
So, here’s my idea for how to reviz this dashboard:
As there are a lot of data points to show neatly on a single chart, I want to take advantage of Tableau’s Parameter/Set actions to build ‘drilldown’ capability. The map will allow users to investigate the spatial trends which seem like a natural first question to ask of this data. The drilldown will also apply to the map and I am looking to build up some buttons that colour each state by most/least/average affordability. Overall, the dashboard should be much less overloaded but encourage user interaction rather than exclude detail.
Feedback is welcome so let me know your thoughts, also feel free to check my other blogs on the data school website! The original data looked like this:
Thanks for reading! Joe (@Joe_Tableau)
