Why are you bursting my bubbles?

MakeoverMonday was an especially special event this week as the digital gathered together at the Tableau Customer Conference for a live makeover in Vegas. As you can imagine this is an exciting opportunity to meet fellow #MakeoverMonday regulars and newbies in real life, but also a challenge yourself to create something presentable within an hour while Andy and Eva looking over your shoulder.

Personally, I would rather spend days wondering how I am going to visualize the dataset of the week, play with the numbers a bit and iterate far longer than any sane person.

In an attempt to test my pain tolerance, I presented what was cobbled together within the time constraint. My work was less than polished, but worse yet… I presented packed bubbles #gasp

The audience quickly let me know my chart choice was a big no no. Unfortunately I hadn’t realized my mistake prior to ascending the stage stairs to what was sure to be a roast. Instead of defending the chart type I tried to explain what lead me these blocks of bubbles.

The viz started as a heat map, because I wanted to test a theory. Will a heat map show that the States are getting fatter over time?

The heat map is somewhat helpful, but doesn’t quite capture my story. Another problem I had with the squares is how to abstract away the individual states.

Imagine looking a music festival from the sky. I wanted to get a sense of which obesity / year combos were most common in the way crowds around a stage indicate who’s music is most popular. Don’t ask me why. We only had an hour to come up with something!

This chart did a better job showing the trend toward a fatter America, but we still don’t get a good sense for how many states fall within each intersection.

In an attempt to show those counts like you might see is a unit chart I threw state onto the detail marks card to get a unit-esque chart. The only difference, which is the biggest downfall of bubble packs is unit charts units have meaningful positions.

Look, we only got an hour to make something meaningful and I put a lot of pressure on myself! How can you expect me to make good decisions?

After some reflection on my chart choice, multiple attempts at making the bubbles work and research on the chart type I have to admit… we shouldn’t go using this chart all willy nilly.

If challenging comparisons was the only issue with packed bubble, we might write this chart debate off completely.

The example above is more similar to the packed bubbles you’ll find most often and these are even more dangerous than my makeover!

If you aren’t comfortable saying which product type has the more products, then this chart clearly isn’t working.

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