Follow Dashboard Best Practices

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the value of properly presenting analysis.
Explain the three categories of dashboard design best practices.
Explain the vizzes used in this module.

This module is for training purposes only. It does not indicate Love Productions, Ltd., relating to The Great British Bake Off, endorses Salesforce or its services.

Before You Start

Before you start this module, make sure you complete Detailed Data Analysis. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that module.

Build Better Dashboards

Chefs have long told us we eat with our eyes. A meal served with a beautiful presentation tastes better than the same meal thrown at a plate willy-nilly. Data analysis is the same. Even if all the elements of analysis don’t change, taking the time to tweak and adjust the presentation makes a huge difference for the recipient.

As with cooking and baking, there’s a lot of artistry involved in presentation. (Developing that flair is beyond the scope of this module, though we highly encourage you to explore what’s out there on Tableau Public. Go find your inner data storytelling artist!) But remember what the judges often say in The Great British Bake Off—what we don’t want is “style over substance.”

The whitepaper 10 Best Practices for Building Effective Dashboards has three categories of best practices for designing dashboards.

Thoughtful planning, which includes knowing your audience and building efficient displays.
Informed design, which includes limiting the focus and encouraging exploration with interactivity.
Refinement, which includes using elements like tooltips and minimizing clutter.

In the following units, you learn the substance, the how-to, and mechanical aspects of building a refined dashboard. The style is up to you after nailing the substance.

Explore the Analysis

Up to this point you’ve worked with the ratings and viewership data. Now it’s time to shake things up and switch to an exploration of how bakers perform on the show. Because this module is all about presenting and telling a story with data, you use some prebuilt vizzes to construct a dashboard, set up interactivity, and refine things like labels and other text.

There are tons of fan theories that try to predict or explain patterns for how the contestants on the Great British Bake Off perform. Let’s dive into a few of these.

The Star Baker is cursed.
Winning Star Baker for Bread Week means the baker will win.
Doing well in technical challenges is a consistent predictor of being Star Baker.

Let’s explore the vizzes you'll work with.

In the Following Units

If you want to see how a viz was made, click to its sheet tab in the authoring environment. Open the Worksheet menu and select Show Caption for information about how the viz was constructed and formatted. Calculations also have detailed comments.

Tracking Star Bakers

Tracking Star Bakers tab open in a viz; a line graph showing star baker per episode.

This viz looks only at bakers who were Star Baker at least once and tracks their status across episodes, from Star Baker at the top of the y-axis down to Eliminated at the bottom. Star Baker status is indicated in yellow.

To get an axis for the line chart, a calculation was created that translates each status to a numeric value.

Star Baker or Winner as 2
Did well or Runner up as 1
Safe as 0
At risk as -1
Eliminated as -2

The actual values don’t matter; they simply need to be in that order.

Meet the Bakers

Meet the Bakers tab open in the viz with the pictures and names of all bakers

The Meet the Bakers viz uses the image link field to show the headshots of bakers from thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk. (The Image Role feature calls the images hosted on that website. Salesforce does not host the images and isn’t responsible for the content.) This viz will be used as a visual filter.

Performance in Technical

Performance in Technical tab open with line chart as explained below

This viz has a line for each baker that tracks their rank in the technical challenge. The x-axis is each episode. The top of the y-axis is first place in the technical challenge. Yellow stars indicate the baker who received Star Baker that episode.

Handshakes

Handshakes tab open in a viz, with Nadya, Pal, and Tamal listed.

Bakers are listed with a handshake icon to indicate they received a handshake from Paul Hollywood—a sign he was a huge fan of their bake.

Keep in Mind for This Module

In the following interactive units, you get hands-on with Tableau Public. There are a few differences between Tableau Public’s free capabilities and the capabilities in the purchased editions of Tableau. But they’re mainly about what data sources you can use, privacy and governance, and between authoring on the web versus in Tableau Desktop. The interactive units may contain visuals or directions that aren’t a perfect match for other parts of the Tableau platform, and the resources here may refer to functionality and UI that doesn’t exactly match Tableau Public.