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Create Better Tableau Dashboards with Lindsay Betzendahl
285 Plays3 years ago
Lindsay Betzendahl is a Tableau Zen Master and Tableau Public Ambassador, join us for her visit The PolicyViz Podcast.
The post Episode #202: Lindsay Betzendahl appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode of the show, I chat with my friend Lindsay Betzendal from Health Data Vis. Lindsay is a Tableau Zen Master, overall awesome person. And we talk about her journey into Tableau. We talk about some of the work that we've done together. And we talk about just a variety of things when it comes to data visualization. So I'm keeping the introduction really short and sweet this week. So here is
Lindsay's Journey into Tableau
00:00:40
Speaker
my discussion with Lindsay.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hey Lindsay, how are you? Hey John, I'm good. Very good. Yeah? Hanging in there? Hanging in there on this little recording on a lovely Monday.
00:00:55
Speaker
Hopefully it refreshes like one can be. Right. Yeah. Cause it's Monday. So thanks for agreeing to do the show. We've been working together now, like not just like Twitter friends, but actually working together on some things for the last like six months, eight months, something like that. So that's been, that's been pretty fun. Um, and I've learned a ton of Tableau stuff from you. Like my, my like big thing about Tableau is like the map projection. And you were like, yeah, you just do it this way. I was like, Oh.
00:01:22
Speaker
Well, that's amazing. Okay, problem solved. So I thought maybe it would be useful for people to understand a little bit about your journey into Tableau. I get a sense that a lot of people didn't start their date or date of his career starting in Tableau, but they end up gravitating towards it, to it from some other way. So I was just curious, you talk a little bit about that and then how you ended up using it so much and becoming so good at it and writing books and blogs and then becoming a Tableau Zen master.
00:01:50
Speaker
It's a pretty interesting journey, I think. It is. I mean, I probably years ago wouldn't have expected. I mean, many of us, I think, say that you don't. Things happen. I would say things happen for a reason. Like all these things end up in your lives. People come into your lives, develop relationships, your job changes or you're forced to change something. And somehow you end up at this place. You wouldn't have predicted necessarily to be where I am. And like I said, it's probably true for many, but it definitely feels true for me.
00:02:20
Speaker
I didn't have a trajectory of even being in data visualization at all or using data, I would say. That was not my career trajectory originally. You probably
Using Data in Managed Care
00:02:34
Speaker
know, but I started out getting my master's degree in marriage and family therapy. So I did therapy with youth and their families for many years.
00:02:47
Speaker
I was actually doing in-home therapy, so I would go to people's homes, I would do the therapy in their living room, after school, wherever they lived, if they were placed at their home, all kinds of things like that, and really being involved at the lowest level of being involved in people's lives. It was a tough but rewarding job. I ended up moving out of direct care after a couple years.
00:03:13
Speaker
moving to a company that did more of the managed care aspect of it, but still having direct linkages to doing therapy. So I would more meet with kids on hospitals and coordinate care with providers to try to get kids into the right care at the right time for the right length of time so that people weren't dwindling on hospital units when they really needed to go to a residential facility and try to do all this coordination of care.
00:03:42
Speaker
And it was there that I kind of got into the data, like the organization as many do collect the ton of data and healthcare data.
Adopting Tableau in the Organization
00:03:51
Speaker
Like there's so much of it. Like, you know, you go to the doctor, the hospital and they're collecting all kinds of information on you that they keep obviously records of. And so it was there that I started actually like tabulating my own information. I worked with kids who were getting stuck in the emergency room.
00:04:08
Speaker
And so I would start, I started asking questions just on my own of like, I wonder what the average age, like, is it a certain age of kid who ends up stuck in the emergency room or that's coming in on a Monday versus the Friday or are they there? What is their outcome? Do they end up in the hospital? Do they go back home? Like I was just curious. And so I started keeping track of all this for a couple months and then I had no idea. I should have known, but I didn't. The organization collected this already. Like all of this was put into a computer. Like I'm typing all this in anyway and saying,
00:04:38
Speaker
in the state and they came out that day, right? They had data for like this day. I didn't know. I never looked at the reports because I was just through the work, not analyze the reports. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, they have like hundreds and hundreds of reports. Yeah. Um, so I got really into just understanding and being able to like change maybe what I did based on understanding the data, like, you know, being more predictive of, Hey,
00:05:08
Speaker
I don't know, given all this criteria, this kid might be hard to move out of the ED because they're 13 and they're aggressive and the hospital won't take, I don't know. Like I was able to kind of think more than when I had the data. And so, yeah, I ended up slowly. I think with anyone you start kind of in your career, like making choices on, I think I want to apply for this internal position versus this one. Do I want to be a supervisor of the clinical department or do I want to move into the quality
00:05:37
Speaker
data department, which was, you know, would obviously get more into the data. And so, like, I started making these kind of shifts and choices and relationships of people who were more on the data side of things. And that's how it kind of got started where I was very interested in it. And the long story short is that once I found out what the reports looked like, I realized that we were not doing
00:06:07
Speaker
our best to use this data. Like we were not visualizing it well, right? And so I was on the end of, I didn't even know we had data and then when I saw it, I didn't know what to do with it because it was all like just tables. Um, so once I was in the department that I could make actual change, um, I looked to find what was out there that would help us improve.
Engagement with Tableau Community
00:06:31
Speaker
You know, I, we could do so much more with it. So yeah, I found Tableau.
00:06:37
Speaker
And, um, at the time I wasn't in a position of like, Hey, like let's purchase this forever. Right. Like what was called a network manager, but I wasn't managing people. I didn't have any decisions in the company. But, uh, you know, smart enough to say, well, you know, the way you get people to buy something or agree to an idea.
00:07:06
Speaker
is to show value, right? So I figured out how to download Tableau Public, the free version. While I couldn't save anything and I couldn't publish it to Tableau Public because I was using data with PHI, I figured out that I could do enough at one time to keep my computer on and keep public open that I could use our data and make charts and make dashboards and then show them to some of my leadership and show the interactive part, which kind of blew their mind at the time. And this is back in like,
00:07:35
Speaker
you know, 2014, um, they had never really seen like an interactive dashboard, particularly with their data. Um, and so it only took about six months of kind of me showing some of these things and being very vigilant in it that, um, they agreed to purchase like, you know, a handful of licenses for, um, so the folks on the data team and start
00:08:02
Speaker
You know, building stuff out now at the time, it was just like more static, not static, but we didn't have a couple server. We just had the licenses to build some stuff, show some reports, show some value. And that's how I got started where I was kind of leading the charge just because I kind of came up with the idea and was passionate to make it happen and see it through.
00:08:21
Speaker
It's like such a common story that I hear is like, I was really interested and I tried some stuff out and then I showed it and I like, people were like, oh my goodness. And then like, yeah, it's, it's so interesting. So the data that they were sharing, I guess, was it just like tables in PDF format? They were just like on some drive that nobody really looked at, but it was just like, just like automatically piped out.
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah. So there were so many reports that people would ask for and they would just, you know, either be like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly reports, whatever. And they would go to a folder, right? Where you just have one after the other. And if it was your job to like, look at a certain report, you would be pretty familiar with looking at this table. Um, the problem is like, you know, so, so yes, there'd be like one person who would really know it well and they're like, Oh yeah, I totally find value in this. And I'd be like,
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, but are we sure you're not missing something? How are you really comparing all these numbers? These are huge reports. I don't know because I was like, this is terrible. I wouldn't want to look at this thing.
00:09:28
Speaker
I don't know. I just got really passionate about making it happen. And yeah, I think people started, you know, I think with anything, like if you are energetic about something, no matter what your mission or your value is, like people will feel that. And I think then believe in it, right?
00:09:47
Speaker
Um, so, I mean, I just kept pursuing it. And, uh, the leadership around me were like, you've got a great idea. I mean, even my CEO at the time was just like, he would come to my desk, which was like rare for like the CEO. And I started to do that, but he was like, I
Creativity and Curiosity in Data Visualization
00:10:01
Speaker
want you to build this like report for me and kind of like, don't tell me right now. And I'm not going through the right channels, but I can do that. You're like, you're the CEO by the way, you know, so he's like, I can get it right. But I love this so much. Like I want to make this happen. Like.
00:10:16
Speaker
We need to show this to our stakeholders and do more so that we can get it going. And people just really supported the innovative ideas and made it happen. And it's pretty cool looking back because they're pretty grateful about it. They've come so far. So then how did you go from
00:10:36
Speaker
you know, basically learning Tableau, having this internal success with internal data to more on the public side. I mean, I guess it's, I mean, I don't think there's any way to solve this, but it's part of the Tableau Zen master program, along with a lot of their programs that you really do need to be publishing stuff publicly, which is the only way I guess they could do it. Right. But I'm sure there are amazing people doing amazing work in Tableau that their stuff never sees the light of.
00:11:03
Speaker
Right. They outside their organization. So how did you, you know, how did you move or combine? I guess the two probably. Yeah, it is. You're right. It's interesting. I mean, I sometimes feel like the biggest fraud, as I'm sure many do, when you know people internally or you know, people that are not in the community who are just fantastic wizards at this stuff. Right. Right. So that's sort of the nature of the way the Zen Master program is, is definitely like a community based recognition program is what they call it. But to
00:11:33
Speaker
To that point, I had been using Tableau for approximately four years before
Understanding Client Data
00:11:41
Speaker
I ever really started doing anything outside of my organization. So, and part of that was I was definitely a consumer of the community in the sense that I looked on Tableau Public for ideas. I downloaded dashboards to learn something. I checked the forums.
00:12:02
Speaker
reached out because I needed to grow, right? And so there are formal avenues to doing that, which I never took. I never took a formal like tableau class. So I took the informal route, which was learning from what everyone's putting out there already, the free stuff, right? The blogs people are doing, you know, the visit the days, I would look at the gallery and just
00:12:23
Speaker
I looked through it. And so the more I did that, the more I realized that there was this community out there. Like obviously these were real people. They were doing this great stuff. And I, December of, I guess it was 2017, I'm going to 2018. I was on vacation in Vermont at my parents' house and had some time. And I was like, I guess I'll get on Twitter. I hear that's where people are. And I had a mom that was like,
00:12:51
Speaker
I've heard about this new social media thing. The funny thing is, I had apparently already had a Twitter account for 10 years and had never used it. I was like, wow. Early adopter, late user. Totally. I literally never used it.
00:13:08
Speaker
It's funny because I'm like, it's like your 10 year anniversary. I was like, huh, I don't have like a single tweet. I don't even know what Twitter is. How many characters can I use? Like, I don't know. Right. Yeah. Like I totally understand. But, um, so I was like, I don't even know where I heard that that's where I could find or connect to people. Right. Cause you kind of needed some platform to talk to the folks who are posting on Table Public. Right. Public doesn't necessarily have a, you know, a communication cart to it.
00:13:35
Speaker
So yes, we were following some other Zen master, some other people that I just knew in the community, names that were familiar. And I ended up getting involved in the Makeover Monday, which is a common story. And for those who don't know, it's just a weekly data set that you're tasked with re-visualizing hypothetically better and with more data techniques and making it easier to understand. There's often really crappy
00:14:05
Speaker
um, visualizations they try to do to say like, this isn't really effective. Like do that. And that was a way for me not just to connect, but to try to learn new skills. But it really was how I figured out kind of who's who, what's going on, where to connect, where to, who to reach out to. And, uh, you know, from just being involved weekly, regularly, um, I got very passionate about the relationships and the connections and the knowledge that people had.
00:14:35
Speaker
And so less than six months later, I started my own blog, which again, was not something I anticipated. I wasn't thinking like, hmm, I'm going to start a blog. Like this is my goal. I love writing or something. Like I don't actually. But I was like, and it also wasn't because I thought, oh, I should write a blog because everybody else's. Like that's another, I think some people are like, oh, I have to write a blog to be X, Y, or Z, or to achieve.
Integrating Figma with Tableau
00:15:01
Speaker
And I had no intentions of
00:15:04
Speaker
climbing any like illusionary ladder here. Like this was the best. I wanted to grow. I wanted to learn. I wanted to share. Like, I don't know. I just thought it would be an interesting exercise. The hell do I start a blog? So yeah, I started a blog and then, you know, continued working, connecting with folks. I started my own community data-driven initiative called Project Health Fizz because
00:15:32
Speaker
Again, passionate about healthcare and really wanted to start promoting or helping stories of our lives. I had spent 15 years in healthcare and it was still important to me to be able to bring awareness of different healthcare conditions, having my background being in behavioral health, I know the stigma of mental health and substance use. And I thought there's stigma around plenty of healthcare issues that this was one way to just get people more involved in visualizing that sort of data.
00:16:02
Speaker
versus like all the, you know, perhaps more lighthearted fun stuff, like movie rating. I was like, you know, this, this stuff means something. And I see a lot more of that today, um, where people are visualizing very difficult topics or, or issues and social, social issues. Um, but even like that five or six years ago, I saw a little less of that. So it's definitely like, I think people are more interested now in, um, making change with what they're visualizing. You know,
00:16:31
Speaker
You mentioned earlier that you were, you used this word curious, that you were curious about taking the data in these tables and these PDFs and just doing a better job. And I wonder for someone listening to this who is maybe starting out in their database career or they're just learning Tableau or any tool really, you know, like where do you put curiosity in your ranking of how important certain things are when it comes to visualizing data?
00:16:59
Speaker
Is that like the most important thing you think is just to be curious? Yeah, it's a loaded question because it is. It's a totally loaded question. That's, that's, that's my goal with these podcast interviews. Just like, just toss it off and let you just knock it easy. Um, no, because you know, for one, I think you're, you're most creative, right? When you're actually like curious about.
00:17:25
Speaker
the work you're engaged with. So, um, I mean, I've certainly worked with clients that I struggle to be creative and it's probably because I'm not interested or curious about it. Um, but I don't think that that means you can't be curious, right? Like it could be a topic you don't like, but you start to question and think about, um, I mean, I have some clients where I work with stuff, uh, data that I'm really not familiar with at all. Like I have, even though it's healthcare, it's just a,
00:17:54
Speaker
subset of healthcare. But sometimes you don't know something, like you can be certainly curious. And I think for me, it's being curious about not just the topic, not just also what the data is telling me or what it's not telling me, it's also being
00:18:10
Speaker
curious about how can I, right, curious about myself, like, how can I visualize this? How can I make this insightful? How can I, you know, bring change
Conclusion and Encouragement
00:18:21
Speaker
or insights, right? Like, it's all these things about, you know, kind of feeding your, your curiosity, which I think feeds your creativity, you know, your engagement with your clients. So yeah, it's huge. I mean, I don't think you do good work if you're not
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah. So when you're working with a client and you're having this process and they're giving you their data or you're going out and grabbing the data, to what extent do you feel like you as the
00:18:52
Speaker
visualization or dashboard creator need to know the content. Like, yeah, there's, there's like this spectrum, right? Like you need to understand obviously the data, like, Oh, this is missing. And you know, why is this like an outlier and all that? But like, you mentioned you have some clients where like, they're working in parts of healthcare that you don't, you know, have familiarity with. So how far down the road as the, as the date of this person, you go to like, understand the content, like how, and how far down that road do you go usually?
00:19:23
Speaker
Sometimes pretty far. For me, I work in an organization called Health Data Vis. Obviously, we're able to be very hyper-focused on one sector of the business world or whatever. As I was suggesting earlier, even within healthcare, there are plenty of things, even as someone who's only ever worked in healthcare, don't know yet. But I couldn't imagine having any variety of
00:19:52
Speaker
business sectors that as a consultant to have to figure out how to do retail, to finance, to health care, to social technology, whatever. I think that would be very difficult because your level of knowledge to be able to ask the right questions, I think would be very limited. And so for us, it's not someone saying, here's my data, right? Just visualize it. We're engaging in really deep conversations about
00:20:21
Speaker
challenging clients too of, is this the right metric? What does this mean? Based on what this means, is it most appropriate? Do we need to do a year-over-year or is it trending forward? Some of this stuff all makes, does matter based on what the metrics are, what the organization does. There's just a lot of questions you wouldn't know to ask, I think. It does, I think, help you
00:20:45
Speaker
better design because you're understanding how someone's really going to use it, right? Like, you know, the questions of asking about persona development and how these people are going to use this dashboard because you could put yourself potentially in that position and say, if I'm trying to get the answer to this question, I know which metrics I'm going to look at in which order because I understand what they are, right? And so therefore they should go here in this placement. There's just a lot of things that I think it is important to know as much as you can. I mean,
00:21:14
Speaker
You know, obviously we limit, but we do a lot of interviews so we can ask really detailed questions beyond just what is the metric definition, right? It's, tell me about how you use this report. Tell me about how you think through these things that you do have currently on the page. Where do you go next? What's your next question from an actual user standpoint?
00:21:36
Speaker
And is that process formalized? Like, do you have a thing that they need to fill out or is that just in your kickoff conversation or kickoffs conversations, you know, having the data? Is that just like an informal, like you have a conversation, you then Lindsay go in and play with the data and then you have another conversation to be able to ask them some questions or is there like a more formal process where you're like, here's the thing we need you to fill out?
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah, there's a bit more formal in terms of our discovery. We spend a lot of time to try to do that discovery work. And depending on the client, we often do a number of interviews. So large clients, we might do like 20 interviews with people who are using their data. It's a smaller organization, a smaller project. Maybe it's one or two. And we lay out some of the questions in advance. Sometimes it's a little more informal, trying to just understand how to use it. But it provides a ton of knowledge, both for making sure we're
00:22:29
Speaker
designing to the right person, right? But also it really helps us get that big framework of either scope of the data and understanding it in a way that you're just not going to get if someone hands you a file and says, all right, you know, here's all the stuff, but visualize it. Here's kind of what we want to look like, or here's, we need it on a page, but you're kind of tasked to really understand it. I think there's something missing if, if you don't get more of those inner details.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, so we've talked a lot about Tableau and I'm sure you use a whole other suite of tools in and around Tableau, but I've noticed over the last few weeks or whatever you've been writing about and doing some videos on Figma, folks where I work at Urban or love Figma. And I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about how you've been incorporating it, what you'd like about it, how you integrate your Figma work and then into Tableau.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I've been using Figma for a little over a year, although not as intensely until probably this year. I stumbled upon it more as someone recommended an alternative to making shapes in PowerPoint. If that's what you're thinking that Figma is, then you're really missing out because the tool does a ton more.
00:23:42
Speaker
as a very similar story to my getting up low at my organization in my previous job. I got Figma at my organization at my current job. Because again, just showing value, I think this will really up our game too with our clients. And so far that has proven to be accurate. So the things I'll say is, in just general sense, I think Figma adds an ability to customize
00:24:11
Speaker
your visualization in the sense of whether it be, um, you know, clearly it's more about like adding images to a visualization, but then you're kind of, uh, you don't have something like an illustrator background, which is obviously the next tier up for the type of being able to design. Although, you know, those are using illustrator, using it for a lot of other different purposes, but, um, you know, so yeah, you can create icons, you can create background images, you can create titles, like anything that just might
00:24:41
Speaker
make your visualization better, you can definitely do in Sigma. But the real, I think, value beyond just some of that enhancing a visualization through visual images or what have you, is we use it a lot for prototyping. And so I can actually create an entire dashboard in Sigma without having data.
00:25:08
Speaker
The benefit is when we're working with clients and particularly with pretty large scale projects, we could spend months trying to make kind of this quote unquote low fidelity, though it ends up being pretty high fidelity because pretty nice in Figma. But you can make this whole dashboard and hook it up with actual interactivity. And so you can play through this for a client saying, hey, look, this is what
00:25:32
Speaker
landing page is going to look like. You click here. You can go to this report. You hover over this. Here's an example of a tool tip. You click this. You'll go to this report. It'll filter here. All this stuff. And then a client can really understand what the end product is going to look like. But they can also make comments, say, no, I don't like that. Move back here. Change this color. Whatever. From high things to wrong metric to really detailed stuff, like I said, wrong color.
00:25:57
Speaker
that is way easier to fix and modify in the fly or just iterate than when you're actually working with real data and you have to like change calculations or change the whole worksheets. Like that's a pain. Um, so I think it adds a lot of value to being able to kind of show proof of concept to a client and it's really easy to use. So that's the two ways I use it is, um, images enhancing my visualization icons, but also,
00:26:26
Speaker
this prototyping aspect, which you're literally drawing out in some cases, drawing out the dashboard with shapes and just sort of bar chart, you know, rectangles as bars before having actually go to Tableau and build that thing out. Yes. Interesting. Yeah. And designing it to like their specifications of right. I'll put in their logo and I'll we'll make
00:26:52
Speaker
Um, I'll draw a little like example filters. Like it'll look, it'll look just like Tableau, but I'm doing it in Sigma. And, um, so it's a pretty cool tool with how easy it is to use. I've found, um, I think the learning curve is pretty low. Like it's pretty easy to take at the hang of, which I think adds a lot of value. Um, and yeah, like I said, even if we're not doing a prototyping thing, I've used it just to design like a landing page because it would be much
00:27:21
Speaker
really slick in in Figma and then you have to just add the navigation buttons in Tableau but then they have something that looks really slick when they enter their dashboard and the rest of it might be completely done in Tableau without any additional outside like images or journals but you know sometimes it's a little adding a little pizzazz um you can do in Figma so
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. Now that's great to know. And I'll put a link to the Figma tool on the show notes so people can check it out. Yeah, like I said, I have a few designer friends who really like it. I think there's this, a lot of these newer tools seem to be sort of democratizing design in a way, which I'm sure some graphic designers don't like, and I'm sure others do. I mean, it's a double-edged sword in some ways.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. Being able to do that in sort of a, you know, digital sketching way sounds like it can be really valuable. I was never very good at sketching like by hand for whatever reason. So I feel easier. Plus you can actually share it so you can collaborate, which is cool. Cause then my colleagues can go in, they can like see what I've done. They, you know, we can see each other's work, um, which you can't, you know, unfortunately, like unless you have Tableau server, which we don't as a client or as a consultant, cause the clients have it.
00:28:32
Speaker
I don't always see my colleagues work unless they're showing it or I'm digging around to look at their dashboards. It's a nice way to see their design thinking and what they see in the building in Tableau right there too.
00:28:45
Speaker
Right. Very cool. Well, I think the moral of the story from today is if someone wants to figure out what new tool they should buy, they should just hire you and then you could at some point you'll be like, Hey, we should get blah, blah, blah. And there you go.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, Lindsay, thanks so much. Uh, it was great chatting with you. Um, I love hearing these stories of, you know, just like, I'm just going to do this thing better. And then just like being successful at it's just, just a great story. So thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great chatting. Yeah.
00:29:20
Speaker
Thanks for everyone for tuning in to this week's episode of the show. If you'd like to learn more about Lindsay's work or any of the projects that we mentioned during our discussion, head over to the show notes. You can check out all the links. If you'd like to support the show, please share it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you watch your podcasts. And if you'd like to be a financial supporter,
00:29:40
Speaker
please consider going over to our PayPal page or to our Patreon page so that you can help me support all the folks that help bring the show, audio editing, transcription, design, promotion, all the stuff that's needed to bring the show to you. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:29:59
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the policy of this podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:30:20
Speaker
The policy of his podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you'd like to help support the show financially, please visit our PayPal page or our Patreon page at patreon.com slash policy.