Jitterplot, BI’s Most Underrated Chart

Corporate dashboards tend to contain a lot of familiar components across different groups within companies and even across industries. In fact, I’m betting that you’ve probably seen at least one dashboard from your organization that fits this description:

• Summary data is shown across the top of the view
• The middle contains a handful of familiar graphs like bars, lines, pies, donuts – maybe even a map or a scatterplot
• The middle also contains a table with results for ‘Top N _____ by ____’
• The bottom of the view has a ‘Details Table’ that looks like it’s meant to replicate an old Excel report

If this sounds familiar, I think it’s because the teams making these kinds of dashboards are using familiar chart types to their advantage. The more time it takes to explain a chart, the less effective it is, especially when your business users need answers as soon as possible. However, even if you use these familiar charts, your users might still need to comb through your dashboard for their answers. Luckily, there are certain charts you can use to make relevant data pop off the page, including the topic of this blog post, jitterplots.

Jitterplots are the best charts you’ve never heard of. They are a type of scatterplot where only a single metric is used. This means you can easily compare the relative performance of the members in your dataset for that one metric that you’re interested in.

Check out the example below that shows the points scored by each team in the 2018 NFL regular season. The marks are colored by Playoff Teams vs. Non-Playoff Teams. Right away we can get some interesting details from this chart. First, we can see that most of the teams that made the playoffs scored above the league average, which isn’t terribly surprising. If we add labels to the marks, things get a little more interesting. We see a few ‘high-scoring’ teams that didn’t make the playoffs. Two of these teams – the Tampa Bay Bucs and the Atlanta Falcons – are in the same division as the New Orleans Saints, so the competition in the division could have led to these teams getting bumped from the playoffs. Similarly, both the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys scored below the league-average but made the playoffs. However, these teams are in the same division as the low-scoring Washington Redskins and the 5-11 New York Giants which may have improved their odds.

If you want to leverage jitterplots in your next Tableau dashboard, you’re in luck! We’ll be posting a jitterplot walkthrough shortly. Be sure to follow Softcrylic on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay posted!

Read more from our Data Visualization practice here.