5 easy cheats to make stellar Tableau dashboards

You’ve busted through all the tips and tricks, you’ve blocked off your calendar for TC21, and you still have over a month before you can watch all the sessions on the big screen. You want better dashboards…now. Not tomorrow, not in a month, but right now.

Design your style tile

Webdesigners have CSS to keep them in line. If you want to get fancy without stepping outside of Tableau, design your style tile. It can be super small or you can use the whole dashboard. Fill in your headers, subtitles, etc. Can you do this through the global format? To some extent, yes, but not all of it. And, this way you can put in your exceptions and your color bricks that don’t get saved.

Style tile showing Title all caps Franklin 18 in the header. Title 1 Franklin 11 above a chart with the style (white lines on light grey) set in the chart. KPI Name Arial 8 is shown to the right with 3 colors: ACBABD (light blue) 71A79E (mid tone pine) and 898989 (mid to dark grey). A small "touch" icon is at the bottom. — *Lightweight style tile. 2 points if you can name the dashboard. Don’t judge the Arial.*

Already designed your dashboard? Reuse it and do this as final check. Have you been consistent? What exceptions did you make and why? Can you systemize or simplify these variances? Bonus points if you’re a consultant and include the style tile the final deliverable.

Massive shoutout to Lilach Manheim Laurio for giving me a much better term for this.

Check your alignment

We choose our alignment paradigms for dashboards. Are you aligning on the worksheet container, any ink (text, gridlines) or data ink? Don’t like what you have? Try drawing lines around where you’re aligning. (You can even do this IN Tableau by using blank floating containers set to 1x in a color of your choice. Look at what might be suggesting it could be a line (hint, it’s probably your 3 bar charts that are not aligned by data ink). No, really, try it out.

Masterclass on alignment can be found at Kelly Martin’s Tableau Public.

What does the data say by Kelly Martin. There's a mix of several different charts and text. What's called out though is how she aligned the entire composition. The top and the very bottom echo each other and various lines create balance. The eveness and levels of perfection are just unreal. — *The queen of visual poetry, Kelly Martin.*

Copy paste play

It’s not horrible, but it’s not great. You know the dashboard. It’s fine in that passive-aggressive italics sorta way. Surely, there’s an emoji for this.

Here’s the trick. You can go down to that cute tab and either duplicate it (duplicates the dashboard, but the charts are the same) or copy-paste it (net new everything – I recommend this route, but I like to delete – charts are cheap). Then, redo it without losing all your work.

Two different mobile dashboard parts showing the same information in two different ways. One is on a light background. The line chart and following scatterplot are SMUSHED and the second dashboard is in a slick navy blue (dark) with a filter, bubble chart at the top, a click icon showing you can toggle, and a single line and scatter that are NOT smushed. — *No one said you had to keep the background the same.*

Now, here’s the fun part: kick those charts off, and let them earn back their places. Does that Sankey really belong here? Do you need all 4 bar charts? Is there some other way to express this? Which brings us to….

Try different registers

Nope, this isn’t the self-checkout, but a fancy interpreting term about formality and speech levels. You’re chatting with your friend about that thing that happened last night. No one around you knows what you’re discussing and that’s the point…because you’re using intimate register to keep people out. At work, you might go a bit more formal and throw all the ~~jargon buzzwords~~ LFLAs (latest four letter acronyms) for more flair. Guess what? Charts also have register.

You might use one worksheet to communicate an idea, or 3. You might alter some of the design choices to make it easier or harder for others to understand. Play with fancy “hacky charts” and then try iterations that are less hacky.

Merimmeko chart with several other charts around it to help clarify it. These things still confuse me. — Additonal charts added to reduce the register of a Merrimeko.

Zap all your colors

It wouldn’t be a design post without some mention of colors. Chances are, if you’re really struggling, it’s time to kill your darlings and drop the color. No, really. Let them go. ALL of them.

Dashboard in Mardi Gras colors (yellow, purple, and teal with some grey) titled Predictive and proactive Patient Readmissions Reducer (PRR). The colors are a bit much even if the dashboard is pretty clean.

Now, see where you must absolutely bring them back…

The same dashboard as above but in a fairly vibrant plum.

And then check if your color choices make sense for what you’re doing. Are you coloring broccoli electric blue? That creates a subtle Stroop effect and makes it harder to follow. Are your colors too hard for a bunch of people to see the difference? Go to Accessible Colors and make more friends. No, really, you should do this regardless.

The same dashboard (3rd time) in a wicked bright and glowing cyan.

Oh, and here’s a fun one: size affects how we see color. Do you have super thin lines with chunky bars? Try pulling down the transparency on the bars to get them to match the thinner shapes.

Are you using red? Do you need to? Because we don’t all see colors the same (especially red) and for some people, some shades glow (also especially red). Are you using complementary colors on top of each other? These not only glow, they lift off the page and can cause pain (and even migraines). And yes…especially red.

Red on blue scatterplot. The dots are painful and glow against the blue (chromostereopsis).

Are your colors appropriately weighted for what you’re doing? Check a picture in greyscale and see what stands out. Do you want that thing to stand out?

Same scatterplot as above but black dots on green. More of the data is shown.

Like these tips? There’s a book chock full of research and more advice coming in 2022. Oh, and I have a hidden session somewhere in TC.