

What I mean by minimalist is that it has a similar feel to the “Good Night Gorilla” book as I mentioned above.

Let’s start with Sean Miller’s, which was quite the minimalist viz, but perfectly highlights my thoughts about color. How does that translate to dashboard design and story telling with our data? Well, lucky you, I will share my thoughts on the matter. Certainly, it takes more effort on the part of the illustrator to create a story that can carry words or emotions without text present on the page. Yes, it takes a little more creativity to read a story without words. When I read this to my son, I often add in words explaining what is going on and make up sounds the animals are making as they trudge across the zoo following the zookeeper home. How? With colorful pictures which are organized thoughtfully to create flow and movement from one scene to the next. The book clearly tells a story without words. My son has a book called “Good Night Gorilla,” which has only has the word good night and the names of each animal the zookeeper says “good night” to. Something that provided information and made an emotional connection with the reader. Many people chose not just to make a dashboard – “A business intelligence dashboard is a data visualization tool that displays on a single screen the status of business analytics metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and important data points for an organization, department, team or process.” – but to thread the elements of the data into something meaningful. In fact, I believe there were 7 or 8 new people – so THANK YOU! However, what I also saw were stories. This month I saw many new people share their visualizations. We each can probably find a way to connect to each month’s health data set or, at a minimum, find a story that resonates. People like to be connected by the stories they tell about their experiences. Here is the cool thing about healthcare, in my opinion: Health, and health care, is about people. I immediately was excited to share this data with the community and it became the data for February. Gregg informed me that he had a viz developed for this data set already, but thought that the Tableau Community may also have interest in exploring, and visualizing the data. The raw data set is publicly made available by The Sheps Center for Health Research at the University of North Carolina. Late last year Gregg Lathrop, of Stroudwater Associates, a leading healthcare consulting firm, spoke to me about a data set that he managed (and visualized) regarding the closures of rural hospitals across the US.
