Line chart customization

1. Line chart customization

Now that you're experienced with basic line charts, let's talk about another common scenario with time-based visualizations.

2. Monitoring escalated calls

Oakmark Bank's Customer Service Director tracks how often customers' calls are escalated. Escalated calls receive premium support and are a key part of making sure customers are happy, but they're expensive to service.

3. Dashboard for team leaders

Rather than building a line chart of all escalations, the Director wants to show escalation counts by team on a dashboard that team leaders can monitor, enabling some friendly competition to see which team can minimize escalations the most.

4. Using multi-line charts

In cases like these, multi-line charts are powerful tools. Instead of showing all escalated calls on a single line, Sigma lets us break the line apart by another data column - in this case, by team. This gives us a more nuanced view of what's happening under the numbers.

5. Avoid clutter in multi-line charts

Once again - Sigma developers must think carefully when deciding to break out a line chart into multiple lines - depending on the number of categories, too many lines on one chart could reduce clarity and cloud the chart's message.

6. Enhancing charts with tooltips

Perhaps even more detail is necessary on our competition dashboard. Team leaders may want to hover over the line and see additional data points, such as the number of calls received, escalated or not, to provide better context.

7. Enhancing charts with tooltips

By default the tooltip will display values from the x and y axes, but we can add more data to provide more context. Now that we know Sigma line charts can be broken out by category and enriched with tooltips, let's help the Director build an informative call escalations chart for their team leads.

8. DEMO

To build multi-line charts, your data will need a date column, a numeric value column, and another column containing breakout categories. In this scenario, we have columns for Call ID, call date, escalation status and the team handling the call. We'll begin with a basic line chart showing calls escalated over time.

9. DEMO

We have [month] of Call Date on the x-axis and a count of [Was Escalated] on the y-axis. To achieve the breakout of escalations by team, we'll drag the breakout column [Agent Team] onto the Color tab. This creates a separate line for each value in the [Agent Team] column. Sigma provides a number of default color palettes, but toggling to Custom allows you to set a particular color for a category if needed.

10. DEMO

Now let's focus on the chart's tooltips. Right now, hovering over the line tells us how many calls were escalated by each team at that point in time. To add more to the tooltip, such as a count of total calls overall, we can drag [Call Id] onto the Tooltip card and configure it as a Count. This adds it as a new column in the tooltip.

11. DEMO

This looks great, but it looks like the teams in the tooltip are out of order with the lines in the chart; Card Services has a consistently higher number of escalations than other teams, so how can we sort the tooltip items accordingly?

12. DEMO

The order of the teams in the tooltip appears to be alphabetical. Locating the team column in the color card, we can use its drop-down to sort. Helpfully, we can sort the team column by a different column, in this case, the [Escalated Calls] column. This ensures that the order of the rows in the tooltip match what we see in the chart.

13. Let's practice!

Now it's your turn. In the next exercise, you'll practice building a color-coded line chart and customizing its tooltip details.

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