Excel Dashboard Competition>Insights into Unemployment in the United States.
2. John Munoz - Insights into Unemployment in the United States.
Using data from the bureau of Labor statistics, the dashboard gives a deep glimpse into the unemployment situation in the US. A large volume of disparate and tabular information is brought together in a single concise view, which aids understanding and adds real insight. The trends and demographic splits come through very well, and make for easy comparison.
I've attached my entry for this years competition in two formats,
pdf and
tiff. I provided two
formats because the tiff format is crisper than the pdf version, and resolution
matters.
My entry uses data from the bureau of labor statistics website,
www.bls.gov. The data, at the time of this email, were updated through July
2009. All of the work for this dashboard was done in Excel 2007 using either
features native to Excel or MicroCharts.
The information in the dashboard is important not just because it's good to know
what is going on with jobs in the US, but because the monthly release of this
information has a significant impact on Stocks, Bonds, and US Dollar.
The dashboard was designed to give the reader a quick, insightful and deep
glimpse into the employment situation of the US. Until now, gleaning insights
from the BLS' data was left to financial reporters, and to the BLS' own website,
which offers many tables filled with historical unemployment data on many
different dimensions. Search as I might, I was unable to find a source for
consolidated and insightful views regarding the unemployment data. As Hans
Rosling has said, “Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society,
and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them.”
My hope is that readers will use this dashboard to get a more informed
understanding of the unemployment picture in the US, and then, go out and do
something productive with the new knowledge.
Some notes on the dashboard:
The two Y axes on the "official" unemployment rate and discouraged worker rate
chart represent the same thing. I know that this is a bit odd, since most would
expect the second Y axis to house different data. But I thought the tactic
useful in this case because most readers will be interested in the most recent
unemployment rate (on the right), than the one from a year ago (on the left).
While the gridlines help guide the eye, I think it's a long "walk" from the axis
on the left, to the end of the line on the right. Putting the values on the
second Y axis make it easier to see the value where the line ends.
The butterfly graphs in the middle of the dashboard were inspired by
this graphic in the NYTimes. Initially, I was going to use a standard bar
chart and show the bars for unemployment rate and the percent of total
unemployed next to each other. The problem with that method was that any large
percent in one of the categories makes the other categories look artificially
small. For example, the top most butterfly chart shows that All Whites are 75%
of the unemployed. If I tried to show that bar with the maximum unemployment
rate group of Black Teens on the same axis coming in at 36%, the 36% looks
small, even though it's not. The butterfly chart literally separated these two
dimensions and made comparing the two easier.
The long table on the right reporting on weekly hours of work, has a win/lose
chart for each row. I thought this situation was a good opportunity to use the
win/lose chart because that specific chart makes it easy to see if the recent
trend has been up or down. That information isn't easily gleaned from the
sparklines unless the recent change is large.
Thanks for providing your users with this excellent opportunity to show off your
wonderful software, and to show the world how to do info viz right