Road Trip Song Count Estimator Viz

After I left #Data14 last week I had a lot of my mind as I headed back home to Ohio.  A lot of great information was presented at the conference, but also,  my family was on my mind.  We're in the process of moving from Ohio to South Carolina, so as I travelled back to Ohio from Seattle, I was thinking more about the traveling that I had ahead of me...I was driving to the Carolina for the weekend, by car.

I got home Thursday night at a little before midnight, and latterly unpacked my bag, to repack it with fresh cloth, share the gifts that I've brought back with my 9 year old son,  and go to bed to get up early to start the 10 hour road trip to my mother-in-law's in North Carolina.

We've made this trip many times in the last 8 years, so my son is pretty used to it so we don't get a lot of the "Are we there yet" questions, as he knows the land marks by now.  But this trip was a little different, he was more antsy about seeing he Mamaw who he hasn't seen since December so he asked a few times "Are we almost there?", which we were.  We we're like an hour away so I did a little calculation in my head and presented him with a task to keep him occupied.  The task,  a count down of songs.  We were listening to the 90's on 9 on Sirrus/XM so I estimated an average song length of 4 minutes, and we had roughly 80 miles left so I guessed it would be about 20 songs before we arrived.

He started counting songs, and we got closer and closer and it basically gave him some sense of a light at the end of the tunnel.  We arrived and parked the car as the 19th song ended.  Needless to say, he was impressed.

So, with that idea.  I decided I would attempt to put together a Viz, that really made it more scientific, rather than my best guess, since we listen to different music and being a DJ, I know that different era's of music has different average song length.

The average song length is the only data in this Viz, which I found online doing a search for average song length by decade.  The rest of the Viz is Parameters, and Calculated fields.  It was pretty easy to accomplish.

The funnest part of this Viz, was making it look fun.  Putting together the the background image and using a "Roadside Assistance" button for the hover info.  I think this Viz accomplishes the reoccurring theme that I heard at #Data14 and that was to keep it simple.  The artist in me wants the ability to make worksheets, parameters and filters and everything else transparent, maybe in the near future, Tableau will give us that ability.

I hope you find this Viz fun, and useful, especially when traveling with kids :-)

Until next time,

Todd

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