It’s the week of Tableau Conference on Tour London and therefore a live MakeoverMonday at the conference. Andy picked a great dataset for this week’s challenge, looking at visitor numbers for US National Parks.
The original viz is not too shabby. In fact, I think it is really engaging and well done. It shows the most popular national parks in a ranking. There is also more context provided in the accompanying article.
What I like about it:
- The colours are engaging and immediately make my eyes wander across the entire viz
- The title and subtitle are simple and clear and tell me exactly what I’m looking at
- I like how the grey lines add context and show the increase in number of national parks over time
- I also like the grid lines and how they give me a reference point as I move down and across the viz
What I don’t like about it:
- For me it would be helpful to know how many national parks there are in total, so I can put the ranking into context. 10th out of 300 is much more impressive than 10th out of 50. So knowing the total number would help me
- As a Eruopean I would like to have some geographical context as well, especially because this viz could inspire me to visit some of these parks myself. Where are they?
What I did:
- Because we’re doing a live session but can’t actually build our own vizzes live during it, I still wanted to stick to the 60min time limit, so it was important to keep it simple
- What interested me in this dataset was not just the visitor numbers, but also the number of parks and how it has increased over time
- I created two simple charts. A line chart showing the growth of parks by park type, highlighting the 3 top types in colour. And an area chart focusing on those three types, namely National Parks, National Monuments and National Historic Sites
- A bit of effort went into formatting the tooltips with conditional colours depending on the park type.
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