Kenyon Geetings

Professor Erik Insko

DATA-310 Data Visualization

25 October 2023

Design 3

Original:

Recreation:

The preceding design, crafted by Central students Parker Hill, Benjamin Turnley, Will Daniels, and Sarah Casterline, displayed substantial potential but ultimately fell short of embodying a well-constructed visualization. In this improved recreation, I aimed to fix a few of the shortcomings of the previous design. To start, I simply replicated the data to the best of my abilities and let Tableau choose what it thought was the best graph. While I think a line chart certainly could work in this case, it felt pretty cluttered even after I started with gray, and only highlighted certain data that I thought was important.

In this context, the data highlighted in red draws attention to the flower “Rattlesnake Master,” which recorded the highest bee collection at 170 during the month of July. Meanwhile, the two other flowers, “Wild Quinine” and the “False Sunflower,” depicted in blue, were the sole flowers with data points exceeding zero for all three months.

The second graphic is the one I believe displays the data more effectively, through the use of a stacked bar chart. Although assessing the interior series of the chart may pose a greater challenge, the simplicity of having only three months to analyze still facilitates a straightforward comparison among them. This is especially true since a significant number of flowers registered zero bee collections for one or two of the months. I believe that employing a stacked bar chart permits readers to promptly identify which flower garnered the highest overall bee attraction, while also facilitating deeper exploration into the flowers’ month-wise activity.

One of the hurdles encountered during the recreation process was the desire to segment the months into three distinct sections, with an additional “total” segment. Regrettably, the only approach I identified to achieve this was by creating separate sheets and consolidating them within a single dashboard. However, I found this solution to be less than ideal and ultimately opted against pursuing that particular course of action.