Practical Tableau

Chapter 91. Tip #6: Retell an Old Story

Our stories are not new; yet, in the retelling we are reborn as heroes.

Harley King

I think we’ve all been there—a few months after introducing a new reporting format, you may start to get the sneaky suspicion that your weekly or monthly updates are not being opened by stakeholders. Or perhaps they are being opened, but that fresh new reporting format that was so well received upon release is no longer being used to gain as much insight as it is capable of providing. This may be due to rarely fluctuating KPIs, a lack of understanding on how to leverage the reporting, or maybe simply a shortage of time to dedicate to finding stories in the data.

The nature of many KPIs used to answer business questions is that they are steady and/or predictable. Think about a website’s bounce rate and average time on site—for better or worse, two KPIs often used to measure a company’s ability to engage website visitors. Without a site redesign, these two KPIs may never fluctuate more than 5%–10% over the entire life of the website. Once you have seen these numbers two or three times, they become stale, and end users become less and less motivated to use the reporting you’re creating for them. In the same vein, you may have KPIs that follow a seasonal pattern, and your end users know exactly what to expect from week to week or month to month; this may make them indifferent to large spikes or dips spotted in your reporting.

The good news is that data visualization ...