The Covid-19 pandemic affected life for almost every individual on some level. While many of the effects are immediately visible, others are less so. As a person who has not had the best track of money management in the past, I found myself with a general question of, “how have my spending habits changed from the summer of 2019 in comparison to the summer of 2020?”
It was no secret that my spending habits HAVE changed; after all, I took the leap of faith and moved out of the comfort and financial safety of my parents’ home with little financial support at the end of May 2020. But I wanted to examine just HOW much it changed, and what areas I was overspending and could afford to stop spending on.
This dashboard, even if it I am the one who can make the most sense out of it, is also for my roommates to use in assessing how our budget should be.’ It only makes sense since they are adversely affected if I cannot make rent or pay other bills, for any reason. (It should be mentioned that when I showed one of my roommates, who is a financial manager, he groaned fairly audibly and chastised me a bit on the dangers of spending too much on food and drinks).
The dashboard itself is fairly simple and straightforward. Much of the information is in the format of simple tables and numbers, designed to filter extra information so that the viewer does not become overwhelmed, because I can assure from firsthand experience that working with financial information can potentially burn holes in one’s eye sockets.
The heatmap was specifically chose in this instance because of two factors: the first being that the dark red will naturally be the first thing that people draw their eyes toward, and the second being the whitespace, which reflect a total shift in spending habits that either arose or faded out as a result of moving out.
The chart on the bottom of the dashboard, or the butterfly chart is something that is not present in Tableau as a default packaged chart; it is a variation on the standard bar charts; by flipping the axis of the graph onto its mirror side, we can show a side by side comparison while eliminating white space if we were to compare the two graphs normally.
Finally, the heat maps tell a story of how the pandemic restricted my commute patterns, and indirectly, my spending habits. For offline vendors, one can’t spend money if they’re not physically present in front of the vendor. It also tells a story and cements that I am a person of habit; as the darker colors represent areas that I frequent constantly, and a deeper dive into the data (provided I am willing to share the raw data) shows that my commute revolves around three locales: home, work, and the gym.
Although I am satisfied with the charts and how I represented the data, there could always be more. Because this was a dataset that worked with time series data, something to represent chronological data, such as a line graph totaling what my expenditure vs revenue on a daily basis was like would have been a fantastic option. I can also see something like pie charts working here, although I have a personal vendetta against pie charts because of how much room there is for misinterpretation, and their general overall ineffectiveness.
The next area of improvement I’d like to do is have a more dynamic map. The would be able to separate the colored zones by date/time, and have a sliding scale with which people can play around with, and the change would be reflected dynamically.
