Tableau Viz Contest
I am a little behind on posting, but late last year (#GoodRiddance2020), I had the opportunity to compete in my companies annual Tableau “IronViz” contest. Contestants are given 35 minutes to create a dashboard from a pre- distributed data set, live via WebEx in front of 150+ audience members and four judges. Out of 30+ submissions and 6 finalists, I was honored to be chosen as the 2020 IronViz champion! Since the data was publicly available, I was able to recreate and share, which you can view on my Tableau Public Profile
A few notes about the data set:
- It appears to have come from VGchartz.com and was scraped in early 2017
- Data is also available on kaggle
- Since that time, VGchartz has made several modifications to the database which means that instead of just scraping sales as a list, you would need to scrape the data from each individual page of each individual game (quite the daunting task!)
This dashboard was conceptually pretty simple, I really focused on telling a story about the historical video game sales data through the lense of one of my favorite games as a kid, Super Mario 3. For those who have not played the game, it’s a scrolling background layout and each level is called a ‘world.’ Your objective was to complete each world collecting as many gold coins as possible. For my dashboard, each worksheet was a ‘world’ (i.e. a different analysis around the data) and I chose a scrolling infographic design.
I heavily leveraged the sheets as tooltips functionality, which is one on my favorites in Tableau. A single sheet that had the top 10 video games by a variety of filters served as the tooltip for 5 different analysis worksheets. This saved me a ton of time during the competition, not having to create custom tooltips for each sheet.
With this new championship under my belt, it now means I have won a contest every year I have been at my current employer:
- 2020: Tableau IronViz
- 2019: Analytics Innovation Challenge (part of a team that built an awesome R/Shiny app)
- 2018: Chili Cookoff “Best Vegetarian Chili”
Like any great video game, I left some easter eggs in the dashboard as well, can you find them?
