[MUSIC] Welcome back. In this lesson we will begin our best practices discussion. I will walk through an example to demonstrate the first three best practices. Choose metrics based on why they matter, keep it visual, and make it interactive. I'm going to be using a different data set, the World Indicators data set which is packaged with Tableau. And you can find it as a link under your resources. The reason I'm choosing this data as opposed to the Sales Superstore one. Is that the World Indicators data set has a lot more disparate data. That makes it a little bit more difficult to choose the right metric. After this lesson, you will be able to choose metrics based on why they matter. Select the best design principles for your visualization. And make your visualization interactive. Let's do this. So let's say you've been asked as a data analyst. To develop a metric that illustrates the relationship between infant mortality and a country's health expenditure as a percentage of GDP. This is one of the basic types of measurements you do in development economics all the time. Which happens to be my field, which I did my graduate work in. So to do this, So you see these two, infant mortality and health expenditures as a percentage of GDP here. So what I would like you to do is we're going to drag both of those to the rows. So I'm going to take infant mortality and health expenditures as a percentage of GDP to the rows. Just like I'm doing here. Great. So remember, they're both on rows. Now The next thing we are going to do, is we are going to drag years to columns, just like that. Years to columns. And we can see here that we have two line graphs. We have a line graph for infant mortality rate and a line graph for health expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Now let's do what we're calling a synchronized n axis. So let's go down to the Dual Axis as I'm doing on the screen here. So you do the drop down on the health expenditures as a percentage of GDP and click on Dual Axis. This should put that field on the right-hand side. Let's see what happens. There you go. You see that? We have health expenditures as a percentage of GDP on the right and infant mortality rate on the left. I also did a Fit Width just to make it a little bit easier for us to do. I'm on my laptop so sometimes the laptop doesn't always render it as well as it could. So, I just did a Fit Width up at the top. Right there, yes. Now I'm going to click on Label and I'm going to Show Mark Labels. And I'm going to change the label to Match Mark Color. Right there, Match Mark Color. And then I'm only going to label the line Ms. And I'm going to do that for each of the fields. So I did that first for health expenditures and now I'm doing it for infant mortality. And there you go. You have somewhat of a line graph here. Now I'm going to take country. Or rather region. I could do country also, and do a Show Filter. I'm going to select a single value drop-down. And now I'm going to also select a Show Filter for country. And also do a single value drop-down so that we have two different drop-downs. And then I'm dragging the country to be under Regions just for formatting. Now what I'm going to do here is, this is interesting. I'm going to draw your attention here to the screen and it says, only relevant values. And so I want it to be only relevant values. Because the region is important because it allows us to subset the countries. So that you don't have to scroll all the way down to the v in all the countries of the world just to get to Venezuela. For example, you could just select the Americas and then select Venezuela after that. So now I'm going to show you how to actually synchronize this dual axis. And I want you to ensure first that the axis range is cleared, if it isn't already. And then, We are going to synchronize the axis. Did you see that? Watch it again on this one. Right there. You click on Synchronize Axis. And then we have synchronized axes that show both of the percentages in a clearer way. Okay so now I'm just going to rename the sheet. I'm going to call this Infant Mortality and Health Expenditure as a Percentage of GDP. Looks like I spelled it wrong, this is the way it goes. [LAUGH] I'm just going to type, in infant, it should be infant, mortality and health expenditure as a percentage of GDP. And here we have an axis. Now you might be asking the question, how does this relate to best practices for Dashboard? We'll start with number one, choosing metrics based on why they matter. The best practice may seem obvious, you only choose and use metrics that you need. You don't add stuff just because it looks cool. And so in this case I explicitly stated up front we're asking to illustrate this relationship. However, it was left to us to decide how we illustrate it. This is only one way to do this illustration. I thought of it from the earliest we have the data to the latest, but there's so many other ways to do it. The first time I was thinking about it, I thought, wouldn't it be good to be on a map? Or perhaps we could do a scatter plot. There are so many ways to do it. What do you think is a good way to illustrate this or not? Is there a better way to do it? Best practice number two, number two on our best practices list is to keep it visual. To get the readers' attention quickly. Now I spend a lot of time in the second course of this specialization talking about preattentive attributes. And all of these rules that we think about in terms of gestalt principles and how we visually perceive information. Now is the time to put that knowledge into practice. So, best practice one, select the metrics based on the criteria that you need to select it on. And then best practice two, when you show it as a visualization make it as clear as possible. So no one has any issues with the information and how it's presented. Best practice number three is to make it interactive. Does this visualization do that? I think so. It has filters and allows you to drill down and examine the underlying data. The thing about interactivity is that it requires balance. As you're developing it you need to balance how the visualizations are shown with the interactivity. The visualization and interactivity are both helpful, however putting in too much interactivity can cause issues. For example, when I created the visualization here I made it clear. As I mentioned in the last lesson that I want to show only relevant values. However, let's say that I took out those relevant values as I'm doing here and then I cleared the filters. Now I decided I wanted to choose a country. Let's say I'm going to choose Canada. And then I clicked on the region and selected Europe. Look at what happens. So the bottom line is that if you add more interactivity than what you need. Your visualization will not be very user friendly. So make it interactive just make sure you're very thoughtful about that interactivity piece. That concludes this lesson. Where we started to apply the six best practices to a case demonstrating the first three of the six. I also demonstrated how to assemble a dashboard in Tableau according to those best practices. In the next lesson I will continue to demonstrate the rest of these Dashboard best practices. I'll see you there.
