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Build Amazing Tableau Dashboards with Ken & Kevin Flerlage
329 Plays3 years ago
Ken and Kevin Flerlage visit the PolicyViz Podcast to discuss Tableau and some of the challenges and successes they've had, and how you can go about using the free materials on their website.
The post Episode #209: The Flerlage Twins appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction & Hopes for 2022
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyBiz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you had an enjoyable holiday season, a happy new year, and are ready for a better 2022. I think we are all looking forward to a 2022 where we can go out a little bit more, stay safe, stay healthy, and maybe return a bit to normal. So on...
Guest Lineup & Show Support
00:00:34
Speaker
The continued season eight of the policy of his podcasts. I've got a great set of guests coming your way with data visualization, data communication, presentation skills, a whole bunch of great guests that I'm excited to chat with over the next few months. If you have folks that you'd like to hear from on the show, please send them my way. Connect me with those folks that you want to hear from.
00:00:56
Speaker
hear about their work, hear about their processes, hear about maybe a specific project that they worked on. I'm always looking for good guests to come on the show. If you'd like to support the show, don't forget to share it with your networks. Send a review up to iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher or wherever you listen to the show. And if you want to support the show financially, head over to my Patreon page or to PayPal.
00:01:17
Speaker
But all that being said, let's get on to the show.
Tableau Twins Intro: Ken & Kevin Flurlage
00:01:21
Speaker
On this week's episode, I've got two guests coming your way. I've got Ken and Kevin Flurlage, who are the Tableau twins, brothers who work together on Tableau related things. They don't work together together, but they do a lot of Tableau stuff together, which I find pretty fascinating itself. As you'll hear in the interview, we talk about how they got so into Tableau. We talk about some of the
00:01:45
Speaker
challenges that they've had with Tableau, some of the successes or lots of the successes I'll say that they've had with Tableau and how you could go about using the materials that they put out on their website for free. It's just an amazing resource that if you are in the area of learning and working with Tableau, I cannot recommend highly enough because there's just great material there. So here is my conversation with Ken
Ken's Journey to Data Analytics
00:02:10
Speaker
and Kevin. I hope you'll enjoy it.
00:02:15
Speaker
Hey Ken, Kevin, welcome to the show. I think you might be the first like twins on the show ever.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having us. Yes, thanks. Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you guys. So we're gonna get to the whole part about working with your brother in a little bit because I think that aside from all the great work you guys do and also I should just say like making it available for people for free to use like the fact that you guys work together is probably the most impressive thing that I could say about you guys because I'm not sure I could work with my brother.
00:02:51
Speaker
Uh, on the daily basis, but we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get to that. Um, so I want to start by talking about your Tableau journey, how you guys got to where you are, I guess in all senses in terms of how and why you got to the spot where you were creating all of these great.
00:03:08
Speaker
dashboards and tutorials and things and you're putting them out for people to use and, you know, open and for free. And then also we can talk about, you know, you guys as Tableau Zen masters and what that is and Tableau ambassadors and what that is because, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who don't know all about that. So maybe I'll just point to Ken to get us started. So sort of just a broad open question about your journey to where you guys are now with Tableau.
00:03:33
Speaker
Right.
Kevin's Career Shift to Tableau
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah. So, so I started out as a programmer 20 years ago out of college. And I think what was interesting about my career is as I was building applications, I always had this, my mindset was always sort of focused on making sure that data was inadvertently sort of focused on making sure the data that was being produced was usable and useful for analysis. So I think it was, you know, when I moved into analytics, you know, full time, just
00:04:02
Speaker
2013 maybe, it was sort of a natural place for me to be. And I started using a variety of different data visualization tools at that time. And they sort of quickly glommed onto them. I just sort of got it right away, what the value of it was. And then 2016 timeframe, I was looking for a change and just sort of noticed
00:04:31
Speaker
you know, a lot of the jobs had Tableau. I was aware of Tableau, hadn't really worked with it. But I got this job at Bucknell University and Tableau was a big part of their BI stack. So I thought, wow, I can take, you know, an online course or something like that and learn this pretty quickly and at least be able to be somewhat knowledgeable coming into it. So I did that, I took a course online
00:04:57
Speaker
by Matt Francis and a lot of people
Learning Styles for Tableau
00:04:59
Speaker
know in the Tableau community and just got the basics of it and then started to work and jumped right into more of a system type architecture project. So it didn't really use Tableau at work. But at the same time, I started having kind of these just these personal questions about data that I wanted to explore. And I thought, well, here's a great opportunity for me to practice Tableau a little bit. And I knew that I could
00:05:24
Speaker
embedded, so I thought maybe I could throw it on a web page or something like that and embed this content and just create some sort of interesting analysis, right? So politics and sports and a variety of different things that I looked at. And as I was doing this, I really just started to fall in love with Tableau. I loved how easy it was to create some really, really good data visualizations without having to do a whole bunch of
00:05:53
Speaker
writing code and that kind of thing. But I also love that it allowed me to be sort of creative in a way that I hadn't been in a number of years.
Building Credibility in the Tableau Community
00:06:04
Speaker
So most of my learning, at least initially, was primarily just doing personal projects.
00:06:12
Speaker
And, you know, from there, you know, I think I started to get noticed in the Tableau community. I started to doing some things that were maybe a little non-standard, you know, things with curvy lines and things like that. And, you know, as I was communicating with people,
00:06:32
Speaker
You know, Twitter, you know, I realized that, you know, some of that the math and things like that involved in that people didn't really quite understand. So, you know, I just started writing about it, you know, I started writing about how to do these different things. And it was sort of an organic thing where the blog turned my, you know, blog turned into this free help, you know, where I was just writing tips and tricks and things like that.
00:06:58
Speaker
You know, it was never meant to be that but it just sort of turned into that naturally as I decided to you know So many people helped me along the way. I thought now it's time for me to sort of turn that back and and You know and help other people as
Tableau Zen Master & Ambassador Programs
00:07:12
Speaker
well. So that's kind of you know, my my journey if you will, that's cool. Yeah Kevin Your journey your yeah. Yeah, so
00:07:22
Speaker
I kind of was an analyst in Excel, so I kind of started doing that. Ken, you know, jumped out of college and he was more focused than I was. He got a degree in computer science. I was kind of not caring as much as he did. I didn't get a degree in mathematics, focused on statistics. But when I got out of college, I didn't really
00:07:46
Speaker
do much until about, I mean, I did lots of jobs that just weren't analytics jobs. About 29, 30 years old, I started doing analytics and hyper focused on Excel, right? You know, get the data into Excel and manipulate it. And, you know, God forbid you had a million rows, you'd be in trouble, right? So there's lots of, you know,
00:08:06
Speaker
piecing things together. So anyways, you know, I had done that for, I don't know, 12 years. I start hearing Ken talk about Tableau Tableau Tableau, and he's going to this conference, and he's talking to all these people on on Twitter. And, you know, I used to just kind of, you know, he actually had posted a couple of personal visualizations on Facebook, which is a terrible mistake.
00:08:28
Speaker
because your twin brother comes in and starts poking, right? And so he just like picking fun. And I remember him going to the conference and the table of conference and this, oh, have fun at your nerd conference, Ken.
00:08:41
Speaker
So, uh, working in Excel. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, and so I mean, I didn't really do much data visit was mostly numbers, you know, lots of tables and lots of, you know, and I was pretty darn good at it and successful at it, but it came to a point where I was starting to look for other jobs. It just didn't feel comfortable in the current role. I didn't feel like there was much room for, um, advancement.
00:09:03
Speaker
So I started looking in my current company, it was a large pharmaceutical distributor, one of the biggest companies in the world and started looking in their analytics job listings and Tableau, Tableau, Tableau, I think, I don't know, 95% of the listings I looked at said Tableau. Right. At this point, you know, Ken had kind of been asking me, hey, you want to, I can teach you this stuff, you know, you want to get involved and I'd be like, you know, go have fun with your nerdy friends. And
00:09:31
Speaker
So this is, you know, maybe six months later, you know, I start looking for jobs and tableaus on every single listing. And not like it doesn't say like data visualization, it's a tableau specifically. So I kind of, you know, tucked my tail between my legs and went to Ken said, Hey,
00:09:47
Speaker
Can you teach me how to do this? And the funny thing is at this point, I think Ken became a Tableau Zen Master. I think we'll touch on what that means here. But Ken became a Tableau Zen Master, I think in January 2018. I actually messaged him in February 2018 said, hey, it's time for me to learn Tableau. This is via text. Time for me to learn Tableau. Can you help me out? And his response was, yeah, here's a great video from Matt Francis.
00:10:17
Speaker
I have an identical twin brother that's a Tableau Zen master and he wants to have some other dude teach me. So I said, no, that's not happening. Anyway, we had a three hour session one night and, and just like Ken said, fell, absolutely fell in love with it. It was, it's weird. Like in high school, I loved mathematics. I loved art.
00:10:34
Speaker
I should say, not just in high school, but throughout my whole life as mathematics of art, mathematics and art. And this seemed like that perfect combination when we used to sit there and draw transformers for 10 hours straight. Now we get to do it with data and actually, you know, honestly, if you do it with the right data, you can have a huge impact in the world.
00:10:55
Speaker
So yeah, that's kind of how it happened. And similar to Ken, Ken became a tailor Zen master. And I think in a year and a half, I was a little longer took me like a year or nine months or something like that. So he always holds that one over my head. And so yeah, that's, that's kind of how it happened. And, and ultimately, Ken, Flourledge.com and Kevin, Flourledge.com became Flourledge twins.com because nobody knew which website to go to for the content they were looking for. So we just merged them in.
00:11:25
Speaker
And yeah, we got 299 blog posts on there right now. Yeah. So, so before Kevin, before you got into Tableau, you guys were not working together. You guys had your own jobs, your own thing going on. We don't, we don't actually work together today. We have our own, we have our own jobs, but you know, we, we do the, you know, we do a lot of.
00:11:50
Speaker
outside work, I guess, you know, the free kind of stuff, the blog, we do a lot of joint presentations and things like that. But we still, you know, Kevin, Kevin and I still have separate, totally separate jobs from each other. Right. So I want to just ask two
Defining Dashboards vs. Data Stories
00:12:06
Speaker
things. You each mentioned something interesting about that journey. So I want to touch on the thing, Kevin, you mentioned on learning Tableau,
00:12:13
Speaker
you reach out to your brother a three hour session, let's sit down and let's hammer this out. And I've I had a similar experience learning are right had a colleague of mine at urban Aaron Williams. I like said, Aaron, can you just sit down with me for like two days and teach me are
00:12:28
Speaker
So, and not everybody can do that. Not everybody has a twin brother where they can, you know, who's a Zen master and say, Hey, can you like teach me this thing? But do you find that one-on-one for some pretty, I mean, even three hours is a pretty extended amount of time to have someone sitting next to you, helping walk you through the ins and outs of, in this case, Tableau.
00:12:48
Speaker
I think it's special for Ken and I because we are identical twins. We have the same DNA, right? You know what I mean? We think alike. We've always thought alike or very different people, but we've always thought the same. So to have your identical twin brother who's very knowledgeable teach you how to use the product. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine anything better than that, but
00:13:13
Speaker
I mean, after after that session, we didn't have any of these long drawn out sessions. He wasn't teaching me every day. He wasn't doing that. You know, what he what I ended up doing is, you know, going through the math Francis Demi videos that were nine or 10 hours of content. So, you know, even though he introduced me to it and helped me along the way a ton, right? Probably a big chunk of my learning was just watching those videos and trying to replicate
00:13:41
Speaker
what what he was doing what matt was doing in those videos so yeah i mean i think there's i think lots of people learn really well by that one-on-one i think a lot of people learn by watching videos we hear that all the time i personally learn better now that i kind of got a base of knowledge through blog posts i prefer reading a blog post because i can skip what i want and get to the point you know what i mean so um i mean if you are going to pick the ultimate way to learn
00:14:09
Speaker
three hour session from your bad identical twin brother. Yeah, heck yeah. But I think I think I learned lots of different ways. I think a lot of people would say the same. I mean, at work, I mean, you know, when I we try to operate a very much of a self service type of environment, you know, where people
00:14:26
Speaker
You know, we help people to learn the tools and prepare their data and then we give them the basic training and we let them go, right? And you know, so I do a very similar type of thing with new Tableau users at work. You know, I sit down with them for
00:14:42
Speaker
maybe an hour and a half, give them that sort of crash course, here are the basics of
The Art of Data Storytelling
00:14:48
Speaker
using it. And then usually follow up with one or two other, you know, additional hour hourly sessions. And then they're off and running, you know, and they know my name, they know how to get a hold of me. And when they need they need help, they you know, they reach out or you know, we set up time to collaborate on something. But generally speaking, I find that works really well, it's just to give them that
00:15:11
Speaker
real quick sort of crash course, get them in there. Because to me, the only real way to learn anything is to get your hands to really get good at anything is to get your hands there to get in there and try things. So that's always my goal is give them the basics, push them out there and then let them learn by just doing things. And then come back to me when you have questions or need to fill in those gaps.
00:15:33
Speaker
And for and for you when you're doing that, like, I totally agree. It's that you got to get over that initial hump of, you know, some things. So like in that hour, hour and a half session, like what are those initial things? So if someone's listening to this podcast right now, like what are the I don't know, whatever, six, 1200 things that gets them over that initial hump so that they can really start building some stuff.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's the core concepts of Tableau and sort of terminology, right? It's introducing the basic data model and then what we call things. We call them dimensions and measures, right? And then it's talking through the difference between a green pill, a continuous pill, and a blue pill, a discrete pill, and how those work differently as you put them on different places on the
00:16:24
Speaker
you know, the tableau pane or whatever. And then it's introducing the rose shelf and the column shelf as well as the marks card and what all these things do. And then ultimately how when you bring all those pieces together, you're able to create, you know, kind of anything you would like to create or anything you could imagine. And, you know, usually I, you know, show people some basic
00:16:47
Speaker
It's how to build basic charts with a bar chart, a line chart. But the key thing is those foundational types of things that you use. Because Tableau
00:17:01
Speaker
You know, everything you build, you're using green pills, blue pills, the rose shelf, the column shelf, and the marks card. I mean, everything.
Tips for Better Dashboard Design
00:17:10
Speaker
And there's not really anything you're doing outside of that necessarily, right? So once you understand those core concepts and understand how they all work,
00:17:19
Speaker
That's the basic, the basic pieces that you need to move forward. Yeah, getting that lingo and that jargon down. Can you mention something earlier that I wanted to get back to too? Because you said you were building some things, you're publishing some things and you sort of got notice in the community and then it sort of built from there.
00:17:36
Speaker
Um, I get, uh, I get questions every once in a while, especially from, you know, younger folks that are like, how do I, you know, quote unquote get famous in the data visualization field? And I'm like, well, first off famous in the data visualization field is not like, that's not really a famous is not a thing, but, um, right.
00:17:54
Speaker
But like when, because my answer is going to be, I think the same as what your answer is going to be. But I want to give you just a, or in both of you really, because you both have this, this platform and this website and this blog where you are known as like leaders in the Tableau field. So when someone would come to either of you and say, Hey, how do I get noticed or how do I get famous in the database field? Like what, what is, what would your response be to that, that kind of question?
00:18:18
Speaker
I mean, I think my initial concern would be, you know, if that's the right, I don't think that's the right goal, right? I don't think getting famous, if you want to be famous, then don't do it in the database. There's a finite group of people that are going to be able to be fans, right? And I just think generally speaking, that's the wrong, that's the wrong perspective, right?
00:18:47
Speaker
If your goal is to get really, really good at, and I'll talk just more generally about data visualization. If your goal is to get really, really good at data visualization so that you can have a great job in the field or create
00:19:02
Speaker
you know, beautiful pieces of data, art, you know, thinking about like Nadia Bremmer and some of the stuff that she does. You know, that's a good goal, right? Or a goal of, you know, getting really good and then helping other people to get good. That's a great goal as well. Getting famous, I have had people ask me that and I've given this advice to them. And I will say that the people who want to get famous,
00:19:32
Speaker
They usually don't, right? Because I just don't think it's the right, I don't think that's enough of a drive in this to get really good at it. And that was certainly never, I don't know that we're famous, maybe within the Tableau community we're famous, but it was never a goal for me, right? I mean, I wanted to get good at it for work, but I also started to love it. And I just wanted to get good at it so I could create the things that I saw other people doing.
00:20:02
Speaker
you know Adam
Tableau Conference Talk Highlights
00:20:03
Speaker
McCann was like one of the big people like how can I create these crazy things that Adam's creating and I just wanted to get to that point just for my own development and you know and I think where we started to become
00:20:18
Speaker
Well known was you know that when we when we started to share that knowledge with people, you know freely and openly, you know You go to our website. We make zero dollars off of it. Um, there's no advertisements that's just you know, it's purely there because we love this stuff and we want to help other people to
00:20:36
Speaker
to learn it and get better at it and yeah so the goal was never to be famous and I just think that's the wrong sort of perspective coming into this.
00:20:52
Speaker
You're going to have to share content. You're going to have to help people. You're going to have to put blog posts out. You're going to have to create interesting visualizations. You're going to have to create
Impact of Collaboration on Their Relationship
00:21:02
Speaker
some techniques that maybe people have never seen before. So I 100% agree with Ken. The goal shouldn't be to be famous. But there is some idea of if you are going to be in, you know,
00:21:15
Speaker
create your own consultancy company and you wanted to be able to grow your business and be kind of known for your skills. I mean, there are ways to do that. And I think like tessellation run by Luke Stancia, another Tebos ambassador, he's done a great job of building
00:21:34
Speaker
His company through sharing lots of free content Visualizations lots of blog posts and and all that content is free on his website. So I think there is some level to you know Not necessarily being famous but to building your credibility In the in the database community. Yeah, right Right building your credibility not so much like doing it to get that following to be famous but to that following
00:22:01
Speaker
shows up because you are producing good stuff that people can use. You've both mentioned a whole bunch of people so far that you utilize it. No, it's great. I'll put links to all these folks in the show notes so people can check them out. That is one thing about the Tableau community that regardless of whether people like Tableau or don't like Tableau, use it or don't lose it. I think everybody can agree that there's a very active Tableau community.
00:22:27
Speaker
And so I want to ask you quickly about the Zen Master Program and the Tableau Ambassador Program, because you're both of those, and how you view that as part of this bigger Tableau community. So, Kevin, if you want to take a shot at describing those two to start.
00:22:48
Speaker
So first off, the Tableau Zen Master Program and the Ambassador Program are both real things. That title
Podcast Conclusion & Support
00:22:56
Speaker
of Tableau Zen Master, when I first heard it, I thought it was like, you know, somebody, you know, gave themselves that title. And it's not exactly true. It's actually a program run by Tableau. It's basically Tableau, I think they call it their recognition program. So there's kind of two levels that Tableau Zen Master and Tableau Ambassadors. Tableau Ambassadors, there's
00:23:17
Speaker
like six different arms of it now. I think Tableau Public Ambassador, Tableau Public is the free kind of version of Tableau that you can use and publish up visualizations on the public page. Social ambassadors, forums ambassadors, Tableau forums where people can ask questions and people can especially help people get answers to those questions.
00:23:42
Speaker
CRM, there's like six different branches of Tableau Ambassadors, and how it works is essentially people in the community, they open up nominations, people in the community, when I say they, I mean Tableau, but people in the community will nominate others, and then Tableau ultimately selects a group of people to become an ambassador. Ken is a Tableau forums ambassador, I am a Tableau public ambassador,
00:24:05
Speaker
Ken's been that three or four years, I've been for a couple of years. I think in total, there's a couple hundred Tableau, maybe 300 Tableau ambassadors, even have student ambassadors as one of those arms. So I think there's 300, there may be 400 Tableau ambassadors and all in these kind of different areas.
00:24:25
Speaker
Tablets and masters are kind of the same general idea. So there's far less of them. So the idea with, again, Tableau opens up nominations and peers nominate people and say why they should, but they have a really specific criteria for that. First, you have to be a master of Tableau.
00:24:46
Speaker
And that could be a master of the core product or the Tableau server or some other aspect, but you have to be a master of Tableau. You have to be a collaborator, work with other people, help other people, collaborate with, I could get into it momentarily, but collaborate with the development team of Tableau.
00:25:08
Speaker
And then third is to be a teacher. It doesn't mean that you're sitting in front of a class and teaching, but it means you're doing something to help others learn. Writing blog posts. I'll mention another name, Tim Nagwena, who's another Tableau Zen Master. He has a great YouTube channel. So he does lots of videos, especially on new features. So those types of things where he actually teaching people. So if you can kind of cover those three categories, people will nominate you and Tableau will choose
00:25:38
Speaker
choose you potentially as a Tableau Zen Master. In the total, I think the program, I have a visualization on this, I think it started in 2012. In total, there's been 90 unique Tableau Zen Masters. Right now, there are 41 plus 12 Hall of Fame Tableau Zen Masters.
00:25:58
Speaker
I'm lucky enough that I had before I even started, before I even downloaded Tableau to have an identical twin brother, and then as a Zen Master, and then six months down the road, I started working for Jeffrey Shafer. I think, you know, Jeffrey Shafer, I still work for Jeff. So six months after starting to learn Tableau, I started working for Jeff, who is currently a Hall of Fame Tableau Zen Master.
00:26:18
Speaker
Um, so that's kind of how it's selected. Like I said, you know, with the hall of fame, the managers are 53 in the world. So it's a, it's a huge honor. Uh, and we get to do lots of cool stuff, like, you know, get some insights on what's coming up, you know, what the, the, um, what's future enhancement look, looks like. And, uh, you know, we could provide feedback on that. So it's really cool. Cause we can, we able to help others will also help shape what that product looks like down the road. So.
00:26:46
Speaker
And to be clear, the Zen Master title is every year. It's not like you're a Zen Master in 2020 and you're necessarily a Zen Master in 2021. You need to go through the whole nomination process and...
00:27:01
Speaker
I would guess there's like an application or whatever you have to submit to do it every year. You're right. That's, that's exactly right. Usually the ambassador program does, starts nominations in the summer and then Zen program starts nominations or early in the year, usually in January. And you're right. It's a year. So if you went, you're a Tableau Zen master and I just did absolutely nothing. I disappeared off the face of the earth. I probably wouldn't be one the next year.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, the exception to that is the Hall of Fame. If you qualify for the Hall of Fame, if you've been a Zen for five years, I think, and then you still have to kind of be inducted or nominated or something like that. But then you're sort of a Hall of Famer in perpetuity. Forever. Yeah. Although the unplugging for a year does sound kind of nice.
00:27:48
Speaker
So we've talked about your sort of personal journeys for a bit, but I wanna make sure we talk a little bit about dashboarding in general. So I wanna ask you just a couple of questions about dashboarding before we wrap up. And I'll start maybe with Ken. So this is maybe a loaded question, I don't know, but like, how would you define a dashboard?
00:28:12
Speaker
Well, I'm going to pass this one over to Kevin. I think there's a natural in because I'm going to talk about the big book of dashboards. So if everybody doesn't know the big book of dashboards, it was written by my boss, Jeffrey Shafer, Steve Wexler and Andy Cottgrave. Oh, boy, I guess it's been out for five years or something. And they tell this story all the time about
00:28:40
Speaker
the, how they started to write the book. And the very first step was what you just asked, how do you define dashboard? What is a dashboard? And they tell, I think it's Steve that usually tells this story. And it's just really interesting to hear them kind of go back and forth. And they said they talked about it for hours and hours.
00:28:57
Speaker
You know, before they could even write a word, they had to figure out what that definition is. So I'll read it word for word, a dashboard. This is what they ended up landing on. A dashboard is a visual display of data used to monitor conditions and or facilitate understanding. And I think that's.
00:29:13
Speaker
an excellent definition. The truth is that could be an interactive display that allows exploration. That's kind of what I do on a regular basis. You know, it's a dashboard I can, I can hover, I can filter, I can, you know, highlight different things, right? It's interactive, I can drill down. But, you know, from that definition, it could also be just a PDF that's emailed every day. It just has certain KPIs on it. It could be a, you know, these are kind of examples they use in the book is
00:29:43
Speaker
you know, you're in a call center and you have this gigantic big screen on the wall that just shows certain metrics in real time, right? That can be considered a dashboard as well. For me, when I say dashboard, I think of that first one the most, an interactive display that allows exploration. But, you know, could you call, you know, a static infographic a dashboard? Probably. So, yeah. Can anything to add to that? Yeah, I mean,
00:30:09
Speaker
I guess I just tend to sort of try to separate the concept of a dashboard from a data visualization. I feel like a dashboard is sort of a subset of data visualization.
00:30:21
Speaker
You know, data visualization, I think, you know, as a sort of a broad category that obviously would include dashboards, but also other things like infographics or data stories or, you know, even data art, you know. So to me, that data visualization is that broad category dashboard is a little something a little bit more specific.
00:30:42
Speaker
And I think we tend to think of dashboard as being something sort of business centric, right? It's something you use from a business perspective. And I think in the vast majority of cases, I think that's a fair statement, maybe not always, but I think it makes sense to think of it in that context.
00:31:02
Speaker
Oh, interestingly, you you use that phrase data stories, because that was actually my next question. So like, the field throws the people in the field sort of throw that word around a lot, the word story and, you know, storytelling. How do you think about telling data stories? And how do they merge with dashboards? Because I feel like a lot of people say, Oh, I have a dashboard, I'm telling the story. And it's like,
00:31:28
Speaker
Well, you're really just, I mean, if we go back to the definition, Kevin, you just read, it's like, well, you're really just letting me monitor this information or, you know, I'm just understanding these KPIs. But like, that's not a story. That's just like letting me explore the data. So how do you think about, I guess, dashboarding versus or encapsulating stories? Yeah.
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, so this is an interesting trend and I think it's important that
00:32:02
Speaker
that the end result be some sort of story, right? There needs to be some sort of insight that helps you to then, that leads to some sort of action being taken, right? And I guess you could call that a story, but I don't always think that it's our job as data visualization or dashboard developers or creators. I don't think it's necessarily our job
00:32:29
Speaker
to reveal that story. I think a lot of the dashboards that I create, that a lot of us create, at least from a business perspective, are those exploratory dashboards where you're building in a way that sort of makes the data
00:32:48
Speaker
easy to find insight, you're visualizing it in a way with chart types and different techniques that make it easy to extract those insights, but you're not necessarily going that next step and extracting them. You're just providing the tool that allows other people to do it. I might push that tool out to a broad audience and each of them is going to develop their own insights or their own stories from it.
00:33:13
Speaker
I think in a way that's a little bit more powerful than if I tried to just focus in on this one story. I think me focusing in on that creates a narrow view of that data, whereas allowing people to find their own stories in that data and that dashboard that I've created can be more effective. Those are the people that work in their division or their department that really know
00:33:39
Speaker
their business processes, and they're going to interpret the data a little bit differently than somebody else, and it's going to create different types of insights. I do think there are times when telling a very clear story is important, but ultimately it's kind of the role. Am I developing something for other people to find those insights, or am I the actual analyst that's working in that department digging into this data and trying to figure out
00:34:09
Speaker
you know, where a problem is or, you know, where an opportunity is. And in that case, you know, telling that story might be really important, but I think a lot of us are kind of further upstream in that where we're building these things that are meant to be tools for other people to find those insights.
00:34:27
Speaker
I'll tell you Ken and I are identical twins because it's the exact, I mean, like word for word, my answer. I was going to just touch on one thing is I'll mention another Tableau centric thing is IronVis. IronVis is this big competition, a data visualization competition within Tableau.
00:34:46
Speaker
that they do every year. They have a feeder competition where they give you a topic and you create a visualization and they judge it on three different criteria. And then ultimately you get to the finals. They just had this last week. You get to the final and you build a visualization in 20 minutes.
00:35:02
Speaker
using some set of data. Now you get to do a lot of prep work. So it's not just like two bar charts or something like that. You get to do a lot of prep work, a lot of practice, but, um, but the criteria for that are analysis, design and storytelling. So, so, and I always got a little bit analysis of design. Yes. Makes perfect sense. I always got a little bothered by the storytelling because you don't always need to tell a story, right?
00:35:28
Speaker
So I always wanted to suggest to them to change that to insightfulness, to where, you know, I could tell a story, you know, I've done Iron Vis about when Napster basically killed music for, you know, years and years and years, right? And that I told a very, very specific story. But
00:35:47
Speaker
I think that there should be just as much opportunity for a winner to have a dashboard where you can extract your own stories like Ken said. Right. In business, the manager is going to be looking and probably getting a different story than the CEO of the company, right? So I love the idea of just it being not necessarily a story, but just being insightful and to be able to get your own story by digging through
00:36:12
Speaker
that dashboard to facilitate understanding right like that's what steve wexler says all the time grace man understand you facilitate understand and just like that just like the word dashboard right i think it's this is just something that
00:36:27
Speaker
we probably need, in the data visualization community as a whole, we need better definitions around what do we mean when we use that word storytelling, right? Is it specifically kind of telling a narrative story about something that's going on or is it something broader than that, right? And I'm sure people have worked on those definitions, but I think it's often kind of unclear what we mean when we use that term.
00:36:53
Speaker
That's a really interesting point, right? Because if you think about when you say the word dashboard outside of the date of his paradigm or field, you might probably think about the dashboard in your car. And that's not telling you a story, right? It's just it's giving monitoring information for you. And that's not really a story. You could tell a story around that. I drove really fast for a while and then I slowed way down. And because of X, Y and Z, but that put itself is not a story. That's that that's an interesting way to think about it. Yeah.
00:37:22
Speaker
We could probably blame that for all the gauge charts that we see all over the place. That's right. I think that's right, yeah.
00:37:29
Speaker
So the Tableau Conference was just a few weeks ago. You both did a talk on making better dashboards and those videos are all recorded and they're all free. So I'll link to them so people can go over and watch the full talk. But I was wondering if you could share maybe your top, you know, two or three or four or six or whatever it is. You're like top tips for making better dashboards. Like what should people have in the back of their heads as they're making their dashboards?
00:37:57
Speaker
So yeah, that presentation was, I guess, loosely based on a blog post I wrote about a year and a half ago called Simple Steps for Better Design. It was kind of started off as my sort of pet peeves of data visualization, just things that I always saw people doing.
00:38:15
Speaker
regularly that I just wanted to help them fix, right? And this is actually lots of input from Ken and from Jeffrey Schaeffer especially. So this has really ended up with 26 different things of like, do this, don't do this, right? In the Tableau Conference presentation, we showed, you know, a lot of these good design tips. We also showed a bunch of cool Tableau tricks. I think they're cool.
00:38:39
Speaker
And it sounds like based on the feedback, they were cool. But in regards to design, if we were going to just kind of hit on the top ones, things like removing clutter, using color intentionally rather than, you know, categorically coloring things or that, you know, making sure you have a white space.
00:38:57
Speaker
I mean, this seems obvious, but using easy to read fonts. We also touched on color palettes. So, you know, if you're going to use a diverging color palette, you really have to have a sort of natural midpoint, right? You don't just run from, you know, sales from $500 up to $2,000 and make a diverging color palette because where's that middle point, right? It should be a target, should be a zero point.
00:39:21
Speaker
And then really just to design a clean user interface that allows for easy to use interactivity. And that's what we really did was take kind of a crummy dashboard and make it a better dashboard, both aesthetically and as you actually interact with it. And one little
00:39:38
Speaker
kind of tip that we always use. And this is what we show in that presentation is specific to Tableau, but could be implemented in any software is the idea of if you have a stacked bar chart. I don't love stacked bar charts, but sometimes if you have maybe like a pie chart, if you have two
00:39:56
Speaker
you know, colors or whatever, then I think it's okay. But one thing that I've always done, and I learned this, I mentioned Steve Wexler's name a bunch, but this is originally from Steve Wexler, kind of improved by Ryan Sleeper, another former Zen, but with a great blog. But the idea of taking a stacked bar, and if I have, you know, blue on the inside and gray on the outside,
00:40:20
Speaker
we can measure the total. We can easily measure the blue because it's along the axis. But what if we want to compare the grays, right? Well, the trick is really to add some interactivity to allow a user to click on the gray and it sorts it back to the axis. So now you can compare the gray. You can compare the gray, you can compare the blue individually, and you can control the total. Otherwise, they're kind of starting at different points. So you
00:40:42
Speaker
You know, it's really difficult to compare. So I feel like that could be applied in any software. We show it obviously specific to Tableau. So I think that would be the biggest key points. We didn't go crazy technical like we have, you know, we've done presentations at the conference about trigonometry and building charts, you know, using trigonometry, which is highly complicated. This was kind of simple and really, you know, helpful to just about any level of user. Right.
00:41:08
Speaker
Um, I mean, so one last question before we go. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say, I think, I think the key, you know, the key word I would use is this, this is something Kevin and I talk about all the time is polish and by polish, we mean, you know,
00:41:24
Speaker
You know, you built the dashboard is 95% there. It's functional. You could theoretically put it out there and it would be, it would work great. But it's that last sort of 5%. It's just those few extra steps that you can really sort of clean it up, enhance the user experience, you know, provide
00:41:42
Speaker
tool, you know, techniques like that, clicking on the, you know, the stack bar chart that, you know, that really helped to sort of draw out the insights and just generally create something that people want to spend time interacting with, right? So I think this is largely all about, you know, if I summarize, it was largely all about those steps that you can use to add polish to, you know, the dashboard before you deploy it.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Um, before we go, uh, one last question. So what is it like working with your brother? Like I said, I don't know if I, I don't know if my brother and I could, it's great. I love it. I mean, I've never had, it's, we are identical twins. Like I said, we like shared DNA. We've always got along really, really well. We've had no problems. I mean, like Ken said earlier, we don't actually, you know, in business together and maybe that would never work. I don't know.
00:42:36
Speaker
But doing presentations and blog posts and really collaborating on so much, you know, creating visualizations together, we do that as well. We've had very little drama. I mean, we might argue who's more handsome, which is clearly me.
00:42:53
Speaker
And he always gets the nod for the smarter one, because he was more focused. But yeah, it's been great. And the cool thing is, I don't think we already touched on it, but I'm in the Cincinnati area. Ken lives up in Pennsylvania. He chased a girl up there 20 years ago. And for that first
00:43:13
Speaker
Well, for the bulk of that 20 years, Ken and I weren't all that close. We didn't talk that much. We just kind of separated. And Tableau, this sounds mushy, but really brought us back together. It's 100% true. We talk literally every day. We got a Slack channel together, just him and I. And we talk all day long, every day. And it really made us way more tight than we ever were. So yeah, I mean, in a weird way, Tableau really brought us back together to being best friends. That's great.
00:43:42
Speaker
That's great. That'll be the next Tableau thing. They'll have Zen masters, ambassadors, and love stories or something like that. Ken, Kevin, thanks so much for coming on the show. This was really interesting. I think you provided a ton of resources that I'll link to on the show notes page for folks.
00:44:05
Speaker
Uh, check out your site and also check out the, the talk and the blog posts from the, from the Tableau conference. So, uh, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Have a great holiday season and, uh, enjoy hanging out together and in real life. Thanks again. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Thanks.
00:44:21
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. Hope you enjoyed that. I hope you are ready to kick off 2022. I hope you're going to have a great year. And I hope you'll tune back in to the podcast as I bring you more great guests over the next several months. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:44:40
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.
00:45:01
Speaker
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