Practical Tableau

Chapter 83. Tell the Story

Once you have honed your dashboard and possibly iterated a couple of times to land on a final product, you are ready to distribute your data visualization. I call this step “Tell the Story,” because you have hopefully integrated some storytelling tactics into your dashboard and your data has a compelling story to share. Further, I believe that the entire purpose of data visualization is to find and share actionable stories that are based in quantitative evidence. If your dashboard does not provide insights that can help inspire action in your organization, it’s probably not worth sharing to begin with:

No, there’s not always an earth-shattering realization that comes from every single weekly report you may create. That being said, if you have put some strategic thought into identifying the business question that your dashboard is answering and how the KPIs you’re measuring will answer that question, you drastically increase the chances of your dashboard providing actionable insight.

So assuming you’ve followed the INSIGHT framework to this point and your dashboard is sure to provide valuable insights, your method of distribution once again comes back to my largest factor when creating a data visualization: the audience. In my experience, the audiences for my dashboards are almost as diverse as the factors that go into creating the dashboard itself. ...