Hello and thank you for joining us. My name is Hunter Whitney. My colleague, Suk Brar and I want to welcome you to this final course in the Data Visualization with Tableau specialization. For more than 15 years, I've been an information interaction and user-experience designer, so that's the perspective that I bring to data visualization. I began my career in journalism, so I'm very interested in how to investigate a topic, then tell the story in a way that connects with the audience. And I'm Suk Brar. I am a business intelligence professional with over 10 years of experience in statistical analyses, data forecasting and data visualization. Over the span of my career. I have worked in various industries including traffic safety, optical, education and health care. My passion in data analytics has led me to publish various research articles on traffic safety and human behavior and more recently, I have focused on telling stories with data through effective and informative data visualizations. By now, most of you should have completed the other coursesin this specialization, so congratulations on making it this far. Some of you may just be joining us for this project-based course and we are happy to have you. The skills you need to successfully complete this course can be found throughout the other courses in the specialization. We'll provide resources at each milestone to help you review any concepts, but we assume you are familiar and comfortable with using Tableau to visualize and tell a data story. You will follow your own personal or professional interests to create a portfolio-worthy piece from start to finish. Suk and I will guide you through a series of milestones designed to assemble your project one step at a time. I will be your guide for Milestones 1 and 4 and Suk will help you through Milestones 2 and 3. And then we'll both be back together for the final milestone. For Milestone 1, you will create your own project proposal that will include your design checklist for identifying the who, what, why and how of your data story and any challenges that you foresee along the way. You will define your questions or goals for the project as well as the audience. We will suggest a few sources for clean, publicly-available data, but you will be free to choose whatever data source you wish. Just keep in mind, your final project will be shared on Tableau public for all the world to see. For Milestone 2, you will play off the work you did from the first milestone. You will import and prep the data in Tableau. Your data set should have few or no outliers or missing values and it should be a data set that you're familiar with. You should understand the trends in the data and know what to expect. After you have your data prepped, Milestone 3 is about using the skills you have developed throughout their specialization to perform exploratory analysis of your data. You will identify key metrics in the data and create KPIs and you will use those KPIs to create dashboards that allow for comparative views. This is where you'll spend about 80 percent of your time in this course, so we will give you an extra week to work in this area. For Milestone 4, you will begin to create your own stories. If you have chosen to create a multi-frame data story, you will define the narrative arc. If you have chosen to create a single-frame visualization, you will draft a narrative description of how your visualization answers your question. This is where you'll start giving structure to your story. And finally, in Milestone 5, you will apply the final design considerations to ensure your single-frame vis or multi-frame data story will meet the needs of the intended audience. You'll leverage the full range of design principles presented in the coursework, such as pre-attentive attributes, strategic use of colors, shapes and sizes, language labeling and scale and emotion modulators. This is where it all comes together for a final showpiece. The rate at which data is generated and collected is growing exponentially. The ability to help various kinds of people understand and make use of this data is an increasingly important skill. This course will give you the framework to practice the evolving art of telling stories in the data. Here is your chance to apply what you've learned and explore a topic that you care about. Don't be afraid to take risks. Have fun with this. Now let's get started.
