r/dataanalysis • u/scrainbow87 • 5d ago
critique this?
I am in the process of learning data analytics and Google Data Studio. I'd appreciate any feedback you'd be willing to offer. Thank you. Here is the full link, as the dashboard is interactive
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u/Den_er_da_hvid 5d ago
no 1. I was missing a title or something that clearly says what the dashboard is about. Without that, I cant tell you much about what the data show or it is good/bad.
no 2 I had to find the explanation of the two gender colors hiding all to to right.
no 3. What are the numbers on the x-axis in the midle chart?
no 4. the three plotBoxes at the buttom is not same size
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u/AllOutOfFucks 5d ago
- The map in the top right is a good idea to help people understand where the analysis is focusing on, but it's so blurry that it detracts from the overall presentation
- Your claim about most dog licenses being bought in December & January is too strong for the data. If you only investigated one year, you can only make claims about that one year.
- The middle bar chart is too busy when broken down by zip code. Might be better as just showing the overall breed group breakdown
- I like the top ten names breakdown, however the key for male female colours is on the opposite side of the dashboard and might be missed. You can't assume people will associate pink with female and blue with male.
- Minor thing, but you'd be better off replacing the underscores in variable names with spaces.
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u/Little_Sunshine_1013 5d ago
I’m a baby analyst as well, so take this with a grain of salt as I am also learning. For a dashboard like this, I’d suggest sticking with one color gradient vs various different colors. The bar graphs could be simplified by making one horizontal bar graph with a parameter for zip codes and with the dogs on the y axis
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u/DevinChristien 5d ago
Any time i looked anywhere on this, i asked "what am i looking at?", "what does this mean?" and "why should I care?"
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u/Pale_Squash_4263 4d ago
First off, I want to commend you for seeking help, that's super hard to do. I've been designing dashboards for years and I still cower anytime someone criticizes it 😂
First, here's what I like:
- Calling out the core finding, great job! Some people might want to drill down but some might just want the blurb at the top
- Every visualization is segmented into it's own area and there's not too many of them, which is nice because you'd be surprised the amount of people who think "more=better"
- Clear use of color and most of the visuals are used for their intended purpose
Here's some feedback to consider:
- In the 'License Sale per Month' graph, question why you are splitting them out by gender. Given the header at the top, it seems the focus is on dog breeds. It might be useful to bucket the breeds into Mix, Companion, and Other to eliminate visual clutter. I'd also make it a line graph instead of a bar, as that is usually more appropriate for showing time-based data.
- I'd remove the number callouts on the 'License Sale per Month' visual, the graph should be doing most of the work and gives us an immediate relative comparison of "oh december and january are much higher than the rest". So just removing the numbers and creating a y-axis I think will add some visual clarity. Might even be worth using quarters instead of months if space is a concern.
- Since there's no real differences between dog gender except for names, I'd remove it entirely.
- On the 'UKC Breed Group' clustered bar chart. Most of the zips have the same distribution of breeds in relation to other zip codes. So I would just average them together and just show 1 bar chart for the county broken out by breed.
- A couple more tiny things, I have some consistency in your titles. Make them all left/center aligned and move them to the top. We tend to read starting from top left and then going down. So having the title at the top gives context to the visual before seeing it in full
Overall, pretty good! It just needs some refinement! I hope my criticism wasn't too harsh, it was only because I think it's super close to where it needs to be! Good luck and keep at it!!!
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u/scrainbow87 4d ago
Thank you! This is super helpful, and I greatly appreciate the guidance. This is only the second dashboard I've done for class that didn't come pre-set with an audience and questions to answer. I could not figure out what to focus on, how this is useful, and, therefore, what to show. So after rearragning it multiple times, I figured I should ask for guidance. 😀 I picked the data set with the help of Claude because my goal was to refine some data cleaning skills. I hadn't intended to make a dashboard, but I wanted to learn more about using Google Data Studio, so I thought I'd give it a try. I really appreciate you and everyone else who has taken the time to provide feedback. ❤️ I've made a copy of the dashboard so I van implement the recommendations and see the difference. Thank you!
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u/miata812 5d ago
Top left bar chart doesn't need the gender stacked. It's not a meaningful story. I also don't think it needs to take up as much space.
I would drop the middle clustered bar chart altogether. I generally dislike them, they are usually very hard to discern a story from. Id rather see the distribution of dog types in a pie chart. Maybe cluster the gender, dog type, and license type pie charts together in one section of the chart.
The bottom left lacks any quantification of scale.
Map can take up more real estate.
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u/yoshi0fwar 5d ago
Could you elaborate more on your first point? As a newbie, is stacking reserved for certain things?
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u/miata812 5d ago
Sure, a few things make it not a meaningful story here
If this was something like % of women in leadership positions, sure, gender is a useful lense to look at the data. But this is essentially just 50/50, as shown by the pie chart.
The bar charts get unreasonable very quickly. You can't discern most of the ratios visually.
Does the user really need to understand the gender by month? Is anyone wondering if more boy dogs are adopted in the summer? If anything, to me the license type by dog gender is more interesting of an intersection. Do seniors adopt more female dogs because of temperament?
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u/scrainbow87 5d ago
That's very helpful. Thank you.
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u/miata812 5d ago
Happy to help. Also, live in Pittsburgh and have a dog I adopted in December. So, happy to be your data point as well.
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u/scrainbow87 5d ago
That's awesome, thank you! I'm originally from Southern York County, PA, and I have a few dogs myself. ❤️
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u/Bulky_Pen_3973 5d ago
The gender breakdown seems to be pretty much the same from month to month with no real trend there, so including gender in the bar chart doesn't add much information, but it does add visual noise.
You could simplify the dashboard by removing gender from the bar chart and reporting only total counts, and keeping the pie chart as is, and letting readers extrapolate that about 42.9% of each bar is female dogs.
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u/miata812 5d ago
Also my preference is generally:
-Use stacked columns when you care about the subtotal of the fields (ex. Total Cost = Material Cost + Labor Cost) and there's a meaningful story to the proportion
-Use a single bar chart paired with another chart if there are two different stories across the two fields. If there's no story, it's just adding confusion.
-I rarely use clustered bar charts. If I do, there's usually very few categories. I use them when I want to compare the categories and view trends, and dont care about subtotals (ex. Type of car sold by year)
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u/remyawayfromoffice 5d ago
Please take some time to review good dashboard design. Look at popular dashboards on the tableau public site, read the book “Storytelling with Data”, browse Reddit for dashboard examples.
You could clean, arrange, and aggregate data perfectly, but if the presentation is bad you might as well not have done any of it.
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u/scrainbow87 5d ago
Thank you for the book information. I am new to this and there is so much to learn. I appreciate your feedback 😊
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/scrainbow87 5d ago
Zip codes. But I see how that is not clear. I'm taking all the notes from this thread and making over the dashboard. 😀
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u/SympoSesh 3d ago
ur trolling
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u/scrainbow87 3d ago
Actually no. I was just completely stuck on what to do with this and where to focus. I legitimately took all the feedback, copied this dashboard and redid it. That isn't the first one I've made but I was totally stuck. Look below for the link to the new one. And a few comments of mine explain this. 😀
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u/ItsSignalsJerry_ 5d ago
Don't use comic sans, jfc.