Iron Viz 2019 Tableau Competition

On July 21st I actually got a chance to submit my little, dinky visualization for the 2019 Tableau Iron Viz competition (theme: music). I just got the results today (August 5th) and I wanted to log everything it took to create and submit my work.

I gotta give a shoutout first to Matt D'avella's podcast, the Ground Up show and the episode with Amber Rae, the Myth of Success. Listening to this episode really motivated me to finish the previous visualization (see RECREATE DATA VIZ: WEEK 2 - published on Jul 6, 2019). So thank you to Matt and Amber for being such awesome people and getting together to help others be inspired and get off their asses to do some real work!

Creative Mindset 

Andy J Miller's podcast, the Creative Pep Talk, has been instrumental in helping me have a healthy mindset around creativity and how to decide what to create. I'm a big planner and I'm still working on switching my energy more on creating instead of consuming, but I enjoyed having something to listen to and digest before having to get started on the actual visualization. Overall, this was really helpful and I definitely don't regret skimming through Andy's Creative Career Path steps, even though it was a bit of a guilty pleasure in this context.

If you want to get the details on the Creative Career Path, check out episodes 170 - 176 of Andy's Creative Pep Talk podcast. The overall goal of these episodes is to allow you to test a career path for a season, by helping you create a specific project that should get you closer to succeeding in that career. What I love about this is that he's got some great questions to guide you in selecting a path and a project, but also how to market the project and reach out to people in the industry. He's a fantastic human being!

Finding the Right Dataset

After committing to trying out the data visualization career path, it was time to select a dataset for my visualization submission! Fortunately, the Iron Viz 2019 Music blog post had a great list of sites where I could find datasets. After going through a couple of sites, I landed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart from data.world. The data is interesting, and it ranged from 1958 - 2018, which is awesome!

Building the Visualization

Next up, it was important to set some additional constraints. Because I was in the airport, and had about 12 hours to work on this project, I decided to only use the values in the dataset, instead of adding other sources. 

You can find the visualization here.

Here are the steps from start to finish:

1. Explore the data. This was done in Excel, to get an idea of what fields are available
2. Sketch by hand. It's important to figure out what story would be interesting to tell, before building it out in Tableau Public. Especially since I'm a beginner at using Tableau, it was going to be faster if I knew what I was going after. The story I landed on was - what was the #1 Song on the Hot 100 Billboard chart during the holidays for the year you select (Valentine's day, Halloween, and New Year's Day). It was important for the holidays to happen on the same date every year, and I thought it would be good to have non-denominational holidays.
3. Build the logic in Tableau. The original dataset only had the first day of the week, so I had to figure out what week the holiday would occur using a calculated field in Tableau. Once I got the calculated field to work for one holiday, it was easy to duplicate the sheet and update the calculated field for the other two holidays.
4. Build out the dashboard. It was fun having the three holidays, and adding the holiday-specific colors to them, because it helped them stand out from each other on the dashboard. The dashboard itself was just adding all the sheets together. It was a bit tough making sure it would actually look good on the Tableau Public website, because the layout fit differently on my screen. 
5. Publish it!! There were a lot of iterations to make sure the sizing looked good, and the name made sense. I tried making it a bit funny, but didn't quite succeed in that. Maybe next time! It felt really good to publish it though. It was the first time when I really put my work out there in a public way. The deadline was July 21st, 2019 and of course, that's exactly when I submitted it. I believe it was a couple of hours before the actual deadline, which was nerve-wracking!

Getting the Results

On August 5th I got my results back, and it wasn't shocking that I didn't win haha but it felt good to get some feedback. Although the results were in numerical format only, it was still helpful to see what my scores looked like. I was surprised that I got the highest points on design, then analysis and then story, but to be fair, there wasn't much of a story there. I felt a bit bad that my attempt was not better, but I still felt much more proud of myself than sad for trying, for putting something out there and for working as hard as I could!!

I'm really grateful for this opportunity to see what I could do, instead of just daydreaming of what I'd like to do. Now I know that I want to work harder, and be able to submit a much more complex project next year, where I can have a story that really shines, because it's the storytelling that drew me to this field in the first place. 

Next Steps

Deep dive into the career path from Andy J Pizza's podcast! There were many steps I didn't get to do fully, especially research the field, and find out what it means to be a successful data visualization specialist. I feel that doing that work will allow me to build a good list of inspiring people in the field, and a better understand of what my goals are if I want to succeed in this field. Then I just have to really commit to it for a while, and see how it goes. Do I even enjoy doing all the things that it takes to succeed in this field? WE SHALL SEE!!