During last week’s data session, John let us loose in the wonderful world of Tableau, which lets you create impressive looking things without too much trouble.

I was so inspired by the experience that I decided to have a go with a dataset I’ve not looked at before.

After reading a piece in this morning’s Metro about everyone’s favourite shallow dating site beautifulpeople.com, I thought that there was potential to quickly test my mapping skills.

For those who don’t know, new users to this site are voted on and only those deemed worthy are allowed to join the other Adonises and Aphrodites.

Using a small amount of pretty old data, I wanted to create a map to show the success rates for male and female applicants from the most successful countries.

Since there was relatively little data, I wrote up a spreadsheet manually and ended up with this:

The data only covers the top 21 success rates for males and females and the list of countries for each differs slightly, hence certain countries only having one success rate.

I used Tableau Desktop, which students can use for free, but Tableau Public would have done the job equally as well.

Once I’d opened my data, the process of creating the map was fairly straightforward, as the countries were automatically recognised. I opted for pink countries since we’re dealing with a supposedly romantic site (though perhaps green would have been more appropriate).

I made two maps, one each for males and females, and made bar charts to go alongside each map. Once they were all whacked together in a dashboard, I remembered how to use the “Actions” tool well enough to link everything together, so that clicking on a country will highlight it in both maps and both bar charts.

Here’s my finished masterpiece. Click the image to play around with the interactive version.

My attempt to use Tableau to visualise success rates of applicants to beautifulpeople.com. Click the image to use the interactive version.

The whole process only took around 20 minutes, which I don’t think is too bad considering it was my first time trying it alone.

True, there wasn’t much data, it was pretty old and I wasn’t overly ambitious. But it was good practise and hopefully I’ll be able to try something more complex soon.