Pick Up A Book And Read!

James Strachan | Data Visualisation | #MakeoverMonday | 2020 | Week 38

Introduction
Let's stop counting weeks now... we might jinx the streak! This week was all about book prices in comparison to all products in Europe. The data was easy to work with, just two price indices over time by country. The challenge this week was indecision. There were so many things I could have done: geographic maps; animated bar chart or rank bump chart races over time; small multiples; spark lines, etc. And I must confess I did initially try cramming lots of these different chart types onto one dashboard. However, in the end, as you'll see, I decided to keep it simple (but only after exploring a wide range of unnecessary complexity).

The Eurostat Original
I didn't think this was too bad. It was a line chart, with contrasting colours; clear axes; a large, clear headline; and appropriate use (I thought) of an open book background to frame the chart and draw the reader in...

Had this not been so expertly done in last week's #MakeoverMonday about the English teaching gender salary gap by @PawanSTableau (literally a text book submission), I might have considered doing something similar this week. However, in the end I'm glad I didn't, as many analysts attempted to copy this, but none came close to his clean design below...

The #Vizabit Redesign
So... to my version. Again, I stuck with last week's colour palette and dashboard ratio. I tried diverging from this, but didn't like what I created, so thought it more impactful (and 'on brand') to continue with a 'dark mode' dashboard. I saw another analyst had cleverly coloured above and below the lines this week, so I followed an online blog by @hipstervizninja to create something similar. I then scraped the nation flags from Wikipedia, cropped them into circles in PowerPoint and loaded them into Tableau. Thereafter, I simply added a parameter action to filter the visualisation based on the selected country flag, and animation so that the chart would smoothly transition between states:  

Dr Sheldon Cooper's Fun With Flags!
Unlike the cereal box images from a couple of weeks ago, this was much more efficient. All the images were neatly listed on a single Wikipedia page, and whilst I did spend time cropping them, I made them all into uniform circles, so it was much quicker to do. I think the effort is justifiable, as country flags are definitely something I may want to use in other dashboards in the future, and I now have a nice set of the European flags which I can re-use. As with the cereal boxes, there was a temptation to use these graphics in a 'gaudy' way, but in the end I think simply using them as navigation sign-posts / filter controls works well. 

Hover vs Select Frustrations
On Tableau Desktop I really like how fluid animations can be when you float over the flags to filter the view, and I really like how well this turned out in the animated GIF above. However, I'm still frustrated by how differently this performs on the version I published to Tableau Public. Here when you hover on a flag, semi-opaque boxes appear over everything that Tableau is trying to animate, whilst it queries the online database. The lag and latency here instantly shatters the promise of a smooth, fluid interaction experience teased by the GIF. Hopefully Tableau can address in future, as it's a shame it differs so much.

Try it for yourself...

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