And we’re back for another week of Makeover Monday. And this time, we’ve got Tableau themselves providing the visualization and data. This week we’re gonna take a look at LinkedIn’s annual survey of Top Skills in demand for the last 3 years throughout several countries.

It’s no surprise that data related jobs are in the highest demand. Data is everywhere and is becoming more and more the driving force of change and vision of many businesses throughout the world.

Without further adieu, let’s take a look at the viz, Tableau gave us:

Check out the interactive version here

What works well?

• The title is clear & concise
  • Always good to start with a question in an interactive discovery dashboard
• I like the country filter to look historically at the top 10 skills. It allows the user to drill into a single country.
• The dashboard is split to highlight the top 10 skills on the top as a bump chart.
• Then if the user wants to explore all skills that made the list and the countries that ranked them, they can do so by using the box plot and typing a keyword to narrow the list of skills

What could be improved?

• The colors on the bump chart are confusing without a legend and require the user to hover on each circle for more information
• There’s not a clear separation between the top and bottom visual. When I first started using the interactive version I thought I was still ONLY looking at the country I filtered to above.
  • Would be even more confusing if only consuming through a static pic as the user scrolls by.

The more I inspect the original, the more I really like it. But I think we can improve it with just a few additions

…

Well, I’m looking at the dataset and…

…

There are many issues with it.

The Issues

• In 2014 & 2015, each country has 25 skills ranked, but in 2016, there are only ten
• Four of countries included in 2016 were not included in 2014
• According to the dataset, in 2015 Brazil ranked Social Media Marketing at 24 AND 22?
• On the original box plot, it appears that in 2014 there were only 2 countries that ranked “Statistical Analysis & Data Mining.” When in fact, there TEN countries who ranked that skill No. 1.

There’s a lesson to be learned here

Having data visualization skills are important and in demand but more than that, we must critically analyze any and all datasets we come across. Not just in our day jobs but in but in every chart or graph we come across. We will always have the raw data available to us? Sadly, no but thankfully that is changing for the better.

Back to the task at hand – the makeover

Okay, so after uncovering the issues with the dataset, for my makeover, I’m going to take the following changes

• I’m going to limit my viz to only look 2014 & 2014 as those are the years with the most consistency.
• I’m going to leave out the “Global” ranking as I’m not going to need it for my viz.

Here is an image of my final makeover viz. Click here for the interactive version.

As I stated above, I don’t mind the bump chart and dot plot. I think they have the makings for a pretty solid story so I’m going to stick with those elements. I changed the layout from vertical to horizontal as I don’t like to scroll if I don’t have to.

The Changes – Top to bottom

• I added a more descriptive title and added a LinkedIn icon for branding and appeal
• I put the country filter at the top to help force the user to use this filter as users have a tendency to read top-down
• For each chart element, I added a custom title as a dynamic sheet that updates as the user interacts with the viz. This allows me to clean up the viz a bit, reduce overall clutter and trim my tooltips
• Bump chart, nothing really changed except colors and number of years included.
  • Each skill now has a unique color. I used several different color palettes to assign the colors
• Added a simple line down the middle to help the users eyes understand the separation between the two chart elements
• Dot Plot – I changed this from a box plot to a dot plot. I also switched out the skill in the original for country and I’m using dashboard actions to filter to specific skills. This allows the user to see:
  • All of the countries that ranked a particular skill
  • The year in wich they ranked it
  • And where they ranked them

So that’s it, I hope those of you who read all the down to here enjoyed reading about my design process.

Thanks for reading

Until next time!