When I was new to #dataviz, seeing only finalised projects by seasoned practitioners used to puzzle me: I always have thousands of questions on the process: how did you get there?
That’s why I document most of my projects, explaining the reasoning, design choices, technical hurdles etc.
Since 2017, the Data Visualization Society launches an annual State of the Industry (SOTI) Survey. The 2021 survey has responses to 60+ questions and was taken by over 2,100 people and the DVS launched a competition to visualise the results into insights. Help us Entries can be submitted in two categories: Exploratory and Explanatory. Here is a summary of my 1st submission: an exploratory dashboard – see my explanatory submission in this blogpost.
How I’ve done it?
I did all the manual cleaning of the data via Excel (pivot tables, calculations etc.) first before using data viz tool Tableau to create an interactive bump chart because I wanted to highlight trends in the top 10.
My Dataviz Principles
Legibility: Talking about top 10, I believe this is the ideal number for a quick view ; I am conscious though that many dataviz practitioners (my main audience here) might wonder about other tools (what about X or Y?) so I am allowing them to go up to top 30 tools.
Yet, I am conscious that so many datapoints, and thick lines will make a chart hard to read: the spaghetti chart effect! That is why I added a highlight feature, to allow you to highlight a specific tool, to better see its trending trajectory.
Insights: The thickness of the lines indicates the popularity (% of respondents who mentioned this tool this year): in my opinion, a simple bump chart doesn’t provide enough context. This was inspired by Ken Flerlage’s blogpost on bump charts.
Design: I kept it simple, to focus on the interactive chart; colours are of course the ones from the DVS logo! Font is Futura
The online dots 