The Baby Name Popularity: A 100 Year Retrospective Dashboard gives a 100-year trend in U.S. births for any name. It also includes six interesting story-points for trending names Mary, Donald, Emma, Victoria, Noah and Britney.
Take a few minutes to check out your own name. You might be surprised by what you see...and read below about some features of Tableau used in this interactive BI dashboard.
There's a myriad of differentiating features that make Tableau data visualization software a leading choice today. A few feature groups that we find resonating most with business users are incorporated into the above dashboard design:
Visual Variety
Tableau enables a modern, polished, highly-aesthetic presentation of a variety of charts, metrics and stories. Dashboard layout containers offer many customization options. As reflected above, we've combined metric scorecard-style tiles with traditional line/bar charts with geographic map views - all working together in unison and highly formatted. Even standard chart types in Tableau have a modern look-and-feel that is compelling with users.
Dashboard Interactivity
An interactive dashboard empowers users to control their own view which increases adoption and satisfaction. Observe these interactive aspects of the dashboard:
- Story Points - pre-filtered, scripted stories guide users to a relevant point, in this case simply highlighting a name's trend like Mary, Donald, etc.
- Quick Filters - user prompts extend the usability of a dashboard allowing anyone to see their desired view of a name.
- Dynamic Text - chart titles and text color swap out dynamically with the filter to enhance the visual representation.
- Action Filters - highlighting a year or group of years on the Birth Trend chart updates the U.S. map view for the selected region and years.
- Tooltips - hovering over a mark on any chart pops up contextual information about the data point which help users interpret the Viz.
While our dashboard is confined to a single page, an alternate design could have offered drill-to-detail tabs with different charts or raw data for further exploration.
Built for Speed
Google and the Internet have changed forever corporate user expectations on reasonable response times. The first tab load times for this dashboard render in under 10 seconds with refresh times of under 5 seconds. Tableau's in-memory data engine and parallel query processing speedily render this dashboard running on 5.6 millions rows of optimized extract data - over 33K names across 100 years and 50 states. Give your users the fastest performance possible to engage them and move them on to their next task.
Dashboard Authoring Power
A hallmark of self-service BI is enabling easy authoring of dashboards by business users. This is another area where Tableau excels. Our dashboard design on this simple public data source demonstrates how easy it is to author user-defined calculated fields like intervals, ranks, min/max values...all of which Tableau computes fast and interactively on the underlying data.
The Baby Name Popularity: A 100 Year Retrospective Dashboard was designed by Insight Consulting Group in Tableau Desktop with development credit to Karthik Tharmarajan.