About Makeover Monday
MakeoverMonday is a social data project which “offers inspiration and a dose of perspective for those who communicate data, and allow people to explore different perspectives and approaches to create more effective visualizations.”
To be more specific, “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”
Inspired by Dong Yu (an amazing data analyst also graduated from USC), I started this project from January 2019 and hope to better understand how to interpret data and translate insights into impactful visualizations.
All my Tableau visualizations can be found here through my Teableau Public profile.
Makeover Monday Week 3
The visualization this week is about the proportion of workers that are paid at or less than minimum wages in each states in the U.S.. The original visualization and dataset is here in case you are interested, and the data source is from Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I learned from the online community that hexbin map is a good way to communicate the differences of each geographical region without distrupting users attention by the actual size of region area (check here for a full tutorial if you are interested in how to make a hexbin map in Tableau). Therefore, here I used hexogons to represent each US state, and use different scale of colors to represent the proportion of unfairly paid labors.
Also, I added line graphs and year filter to incorporate the changing trend across the years.
Insights
- The middle part of the U.S. generally has higher proportion of workers receving minimum or lower wages than coastal states.
- The total proportion of minimum paid workers reached peak in 2010, at an average level of 6.1% across all states.