Tableau Hackathon: How we got 11 analysts from data to dashboard in an hour and a half
By: Natalie Leach
Tags: Tableau, Data Visualization, UX, Design Process, Design Thinking

We had new data and we wanted our analysts to start visualising it in Tableau. So we scheduled a hackathon and asked a user researcher to help us use design methods to create an interactive session. The goal was to have working dashboard prototypes using the new data by the end of the session. Here is what we learnt.

Idea generation can take longer than expected

Not because no-one had any ideas but because they have so many! For our first task we asked everyone to think about what questions they may like to answer with this new data. Everyone was given 5 minutes to jot down one question per post-it note. We watched as the yellow squares gratifyingly piled up. We quietly congratulated ourselves that it was all going so well. Then we got everyone to feedback to the group and cluster those questions together. And this took so much longer than our allotted 5–10 minutes. Every new idea generated discussion and clustering them into themes was not as straightforward as anticipated.

What might we do differently next time?

Get people to think about their questions beforehand and add them to a shared document to review and discuss in the session.

You don’t have to be a designer to succeed at Wireframing

The workshop comprised of analysts, not designers but we’ve learned that to successfully create usable Tableau dashboards it pays to pinch from design methodology. We wanted to challenge people to innovate and be creative, so the next task was a Crazy 8 Wireframing session: “a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes” This was a new concept to everyone in the room and people were a bit nervous. But we reassured everyone that it’s not about your art skills, it’s about your ideas.

What might we do differently next time?

Nothing! This was probably the most successful part of the workshop. Feedback afterwards was that people really enjoyed it and would use the technique again to help them build new dashboards.

Building prototype dashboards from wireframes

You can create a prototype in 25 minutes, but you might not be able to test it

Next, we split people into groups of 2 or 3 and got them to share their wireframes, come up with a final design and create it in Tableau.

This is when the speed to insight of Tableau really paid off and we did end up with 4 prototypes at the end of this session. Some of them had more functionality than others but that was as much about scale of ambition as anything else: those with more complex designs struggled to build them in the allotted time and were forced to add images or text in place of actual visualisations.

What might we do differently next time?

Schedule more time overall. The final part of the session was set aside for testing the prototypes: do they answer the questions we want them to? But we ran out of time and some of them didn’t have a lot of functionality anyway. An extra half an hour would have made all the difference.

Design is for Everybody

Tableau dashboards are a user interface so why not use lessons from design to help analysts build better dashboards? We’ve proven that it doesn’t have to take a lot of time (though we could have done with a touch more!) and that with the right guidance and an open mindset even the most apprehensive analysts can start to become designers.

Have you run Tableau hackathons? Are you using design methodologies to create Tableau dashboards? Fancy running a workshop like this yourself and want some advice? Chat to us in the comments!