IronViz Qualifiers | Ideas and Datasets
Tableau have announced the topic for this year’s IronViz! The theme this year is entertainment, and I hope you are feeling as energised for it as I am!
This year I will sit out the qualifier contest. It feels strange to know that IronViz season is here, but not having the need to get my creativity flowing in the same way as I have for the past 5 editions of the competition. I want to take that energy and turn it into blog posts that will aim to help you on your IronViz journey. Entering can seem daunting, but there is so much to be gained from putting yourself out there and committing to submitting something (anything) for the qualifier. I have always been a firm believer in the idea that you win IronViz when you hit submit. Treat it as a challenge against yourself and who knows where it can take you!
Found your way here and wondering what on Earth this IronViz thing is? Let me break it down for you. Iron Viz is the biggest data visualisation competition of its kind. Once a year, Tableau users globally are invited to enter a feeder round, with a prompt or theme (like entertainment) to be followed. Entries are judged against three criteria: analysis, design, and storytelling. The successful result will be a dashboard that fulfils all these criteria – an elegant piece of in-depth analysis that guides the user through a story told with data. The top three entries to the feeder progress to the final – a live, on-stage performance at Tableau Conference. There is a kickoff webinar on October 3rd that I recommend attending to get all the information about this year’s competition.
Over the next 4 weeks, I am going to be releasing a series of blog posts that deals with each element of an IronViz entry. These will draw from what I have learnt from entering 5 times, and I hope will help you create something incredible. The blog posts will cover coming up with an idea, before breaking down the judging criteria of storytelling, analysis, and design.
Finding an idea
Now that the theme has been announced, you will need to come up with an idea and the data to go with it. I have always found this to be the hardest step because it is a completely different skill to what we are used to using Tableau for. Building charts? Fine! But curating your own dataset for an in-depth analysis about a topic that you haven’t had complete freedom to choose, nor one that’s been directly given you? That’s tough! I want to share 4 tips here that I hope will help you get started.
1. Pick something niche
Rule number one of a good IronViz entry is to not pick a topic that lots of other people will pick. If you are trying to stand out from a line up of a few hundred people, it simply doesn’t make sense to do the same thing as others. Even if your viz is amazing, the chances are that it won’t stand out from the rest because the topic will have been seen before. What are the topics that I think you should stay away from? I obviously can’t say categorically so please don’t hold this against me. I would be wary of doing something high level with movies or TV because of the proximity to Tableau’s recent collaborations with IMDb and the ease of getting the data. That being said, honing in on one aspect of these may also be a safe option, especially if it’s a topic very close to your heart.
Last year I found a niche topic that worked wonders. The theme was love (or what you love). Taking that and turning it on its head was not something that many people thought to do. I wanted to talk about something that I disliked instead but find an angle to still tie it back to love. The main topic of my visualisation was global hunger – definitely not something I love or that brings me joy! I turned it around at the end to say that I love the progress we have made in the world to end global hunger.
2. Pick something you love
I’m far from the first person to say this, but I will repeat it until I’m blue in the face. If you don’t enjoy a topic you are not going to be able to do as good a job. Building an IronViz entry takes a lot of time. You don’t want to burn out one week in and find it a real struggle to keep going. Pick something that you could viz about for days, regardless of whether it was for a competition or not.
I first picked a topic I really loved (like, really loved) for IronViz in 2023. The theme was games and, after a lot of deliberation, I settled on building a visualisation on the 2003 Rugby World Cup Final. The experience of seeing England win the Rugby World Cup when I was 6 has stayed with me ever since, and is the foundation of my love for rugby and maybe even data. It was a story that was very close to my heart, and one that I knew inside out without even needing to do much research.
3. Pick something that is broad
An IronViz entry needs to have a certain degree of depth to it. A high level story with a little analysis will only get you so far. It works best if you are able to get really deep into something. You don’t need to know what you want to go deep into yet, though. For now, keep it loose. This will allow you to pivot later on if you find yourself heading towards a dead end. A topic with a few avenues means there is less chance of you needing to scrap everything and go back to Sheet 1.
I have made this mistake in the past. My second IronViz entry (in 2021) was looking at the weather in the UK. By the time I realised that there was no real story here I had dug myself in too far. There was no way out other than to persevere with it and hope for the best.
4. Pick something that lends itself to data
The heart of any visualisation is the data. Maybe it’s obvious, but your journey with IronViz will be a lot simpler if you pick a topic that has readily available and reliable data. I have made the mistake in the past of choosing a topic that is too niche. My first entry (2020) looked at ME/CFS, a medical condition that many people suffer with but that we know little about. We know so little about it because there hasn’t been much research into it. The result of that? Very little data to work with!
On the flip side of that, my viz on the Rugby World Cup Final did not have much easily accessible data at the outset. I gathered my data for that viz by watching the match several times over a weekend. I was pausing every 15 seconds of the 100 minute game to make a note of scores, kicks, fouls, lineouts, substitutions, and some other metrics that I don’t think many people even realise you could collect. I posted the data on data.world to ensure that I could reference it and say it was publicly available.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking this approach. In fact, it’s likely that by doing this you will fulfil my other tips any way. You aren’t going to have to do this if it isn’t niche. You aren’t going to commit to doing it if you don’t love the topic. And in going through this process you will have such a personal connection with the data that you will know the story you want to tell, and have told it in your head hundreds of times, before you even open Tableau.
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I hope that you have found this helpful, and it has given you some ideas for how to start your quest to build the next great data viz. Just remember, win or learn – you can’t lose. Enjoy the journey, and I am confident you will do just fine.
I would recommend taking the first week to come up with as many ideas as you can. If one of them excites you more than the others, play it out and see where it takes you. You definitely want to have most of your dataset completed by the end of the first week. But don’t let that stress you - I started my 2023 entry 4 days before the deadline and still made the top 5 in EMEA!
If you would like feedback on an idea, or just to chat things through, feel free to reach out. I love talking about IronViz, and I am more than happy to help.
Happy vizzing // Chris