Choosing a topic/tool:
I chose to use Tableau web publishing to try and recreate a visualization we viewed earlier in the semester. I chose to revisit Tableau for this assignment to take a crack at learning some of the tools I didn’t understand in the Tableau assignment from before.
At first, I was just inspired to recreate the Quick Service Restaurant top 50 ranking simply because I found the topic fun. Once I got more into the data, I was able to learn some interesting things about the different metrics that Quick Service Restaurant Magazine collects. In the second visualization there was a discrepancy between which restaurants ranked the highest in sales per unit as opposed to the ranking of their overall growth. I enjoyed the chance read more and interact with the data.
A quick-service restaurant is an industry preferred term for a restaurant that offers fast service, informal atmosphere, specialized menus, and limited seating. Restaurants like these are common across the modern world and while they are most known for selling the classic burgers and fries in a drive-through, this style of restaurant has branched out to offer all kinds of cuisine. One can now stop at a quick-service restaurant to pick up coffee and pastries, specialty dessert items like Italian ice and cookies, and specialty drinks like Boba tea.
Process/results:
The source I wanted to use the most came from Quick Service Magazine in the form of a pdf file of one of their issues. I was able to pull the text out of the tables contained in the issue, but I needed to reformat them to be usable in Tableau. At first, I manually input the fields in google sheets in order to export them as comma separated value files.
This proved to be slow and inefficient, but it gave me a completed csv file to check. Using this format as a template, I found it much faster to copy the entire table from the magazine and manually edit the format in Notepad to match the completed file’s dimensions. Using this method, I was able to cut down the time assembling the table in the spreadsheet while easily checking for errors by importing the notepad files.
Once I had the csv files assembled, importing them to tableau was quick and easy. I wanted to build this visualization to be easy to skim and read at a glance, but information dense. I believe this will make the visualization flexible for use in formal presentations as well as a direct delivery to parties interested in the information. Doing this in Tableau is fairly easy, as you can drag metrics and labels into the workspace itself or onto the sidebar to display them.
Critique/User Testing:
When making this visualization I strove to create something easy to read at a glance, but with enough information available to discern fine details. I found the tooltips to be especially useful for this as the panel sizes get too small for the numbers and names to display. When testing this visualization, I asked users to quickly look over the overall sheet before clicking or mousing over to gauge the effectiveness of the visual. The main goal of my test was to see if my user testers noticed the difference in ranking metrics between the sheet of the general top 50 and the top 50 contenders visualization.
For my first user tester, some things about the unmarked numbers were unclear. Also, the more nuanced details of the visualization required some narrativization on my part. On sheet 2, it wasn’t immediately obvious the difference in scale between the numbers on sheet 1 and 2. Overall, this visual is easy to read for a data professional, but a layman may need some explanation to understand. Small details like the change in ranking detail in sheet 2 need some narrative description.
My second user tester is experienced with this format of data visualization from the perspective of someone briefing the data to laymen. They know this format to be popular with the personnel they usually give briefings to, but noted that they can fall short at conveying data more complex than just reading the size of the panels. They find these visualizations to be popular among the usual audience of their briefings. He also believed the interactive elements of the Tableau visualizations solve the usual problems they encountered with this format of data visualization.
Sources/datasets:
The source of data for my visualizations is the Quick Service Restaurant Magazine. The QSRM is a quick-service restaurant industry publication that reports on goings on of the aforementioned industry in great detail.
- QSR Magazine. 2023. Review of Ranked: The Top 50 Fast-Food Chains in America., August 1, 2023. https://www.qsrmagazine.com/operations/fast-food/ranked-the-top-50-fast-food-chains-in-america/.