Dashboard tips by example- maps to inform, standard and novel approaches

Dashboard tips by example- maps to inform, standard and novel approaches

Dashboards developed for clients frequently incorporate maps. Tableau offers quick, simple yet insightful mapping capabilities out of the box.

I have noticed that many maps used in my client’s dashboards attempt to display continuous measures. Examples include sales in the past quarter, year to date expenses versus budget or number of open sales opportunities. All of these metrics have shared issues in maps- a small range of the metric may be the dominant value in the display, making it difficult to differentiate amongst the values on the map. In this post, I will review some common and novel approaches to mapping this type of metric.

This examples for this post examine growth in US per capita income, from 2006 – 2008. I find this metric fascinating since it could be indicative of the locations that take the most and least amount of time to recover from the current recession.

The first map uses Tableau defaults, with size as the primary encoding for growth rates. Reviewing the legend, it is easy to see that the metric has a range of 2.5% to 13.2%. Overall, a useful map.

NOTE- there are many interactive displays to load in this post, with slower connections it may take up to a minute for all of them to load.