UK prime ministers and their metrics

I'm a fan of straightforward star schemas, but this model has become more complicated than I prefer. But it works :)

This is a scenario of design inspired by Use Cases rather than use cases-inspired design. I was interested in analyzing the tenure data of UK Prime Ministers. I began searching for a suitable layout, which led me to discover this one.

I needed more data points to create something similar to the example provided, so I collected additional relevant data.

Now, let's discuss the colour scheme. I intended for the data points to be self-explanatory, so I worked with two political parties and required an effective way to differentiate them. Following UX principles, two key concepts are similarity and familiarity. Given that most individuals are familiar with the colour schemes of these political parties, I opted to utilize those colours.

My goal was to use a palette that wouldn't be overwhelming but would still make my data points stand out distinctly. I discovered inspiration for this on Pinterest from a design created by Nicole Victory named "Turn The Page Careers." Additionally, I had another important aspect to take into account: gender. I also drew inspiration from the "Turn The Page " colour palette."

Design approach:

Since I'm familiar with my layout, I aimed to tailor it specifically for Power BI. I worked on it tile by tile while considering it a complete entity. My goal was to keep it contained on a single page. I included a zoom feature for end users to view the report in detail or see a larger version of the visuals. I implemented both custom tooltips and default tooltips. Let's examine each tile.

Tile - 1

For the first visualization, I created a straightforward bar chart that displays the Top 5 and Bottom 5 PMs based on their tenure. I included affordances to indicate to users what additional actions they could take with the chart: 1) Select either the Top 5 or Bottom 5 and 2) Click to view the complete list of PMs.

Tile - 2

I want to quickly illustrate which party has more PMs over a given time period without using another bar chart. Colour and size are very important for me to highlight the different parties effectively. Therefore, I've chosen to use a smaller text size to emphasize colour and size. I've made a few design choices to ensure that tooltips match the selected party's colour. There is a "Zoom Into Data" functionality for a more detailed view. To clarify the symbols used, I've included a brief explanation beneath the report title. Colour representations are consistent throughout the visualization, tooltips, and detailed report.

Tile - 3

Here’s a simple line chart with a forecast option. While I can't fully endorse the forecast's accuracy, it certainly looks appealing. For my design choices, I followed similar approaches to my previous visuals. However, this visualization features a larger version of the chart along with tooltips. I went for this method to show different ways but also a way to have Title.

Tile - 4

I created a scatter plot to illustrate how age affects tenure, which turned out to be quite interesting. My design choices are similar to those I’ve made previously, but for this visualization, I decided not to use the zoom option. Instead, I adopted the Focus Mode functionality in Power BI. My goal here was not to display more data than what was visible in the original chart, and Focus Mode effectively achieves that.

Tile - 5

I have not verified any of this data. So please don't judge me on it but this tile was showing some interesting data points

Design choices were very similar to previous ones.

Tile - 6

The final visualization was both sad and true regarding the percentage of female prime ministers. The number was so small that I thought I should add a table to display their names alongside it. I should probably disable cross-filtering on the table, but that would be too much work for a pet project.