Class: STAT 5602 - Visualization: The Art of Numbers and the Psychology of Persuasion
Lecturer: Joshua Tapley
Prompt: Build a dashboard with key information (data) presented in various charts/graphs studied in class. The final presentation should tell a compelling story that makes sense with a continuous flow. It must be visually pleasing and follow the basic rules of design while keeping in mind important characteristics such as impairment accessibility.
Chosen Topic: Can a full expansion set be collected with just two booster boxes of Pokémon cards?
When I applied to the MS Strategic Advertising and Marketing program at Temple University, I remember reading the list of courses in the curriculum and being intrigued. Listed were a few marketing courses, a few advertising courses, a design theory course (which really excited me), a media planning course, a user experience design course (also very exciting), the marketing capstone and something that originally terrified me: a statistics course. My brain immediately placed the latter one in the math bucket and the first word out of my mouth was NOPE.
Lemme explain.
Math is a NOPE for me.
The courses all had either basic, straightforward names (e.g. Marketing Research and Strategy, and Media Planning) or really creative, exciting names (e.g. Consumer and Buyer Behavior and Visual Communication and Branding). Because this was a joint venture with two colleges at Temple (Fox School of Business and Klein College of Media and Communication), our classes were more or less split down the middle with half coming from Fox (marketing) and the other half from Klein (advertising). However, because the NOPE MATH course was labeled STAT and not MKTG or ADV, it was sort of the outlier for me.
The name given to this course, however, had sort of a beautiful, almost history-course-esque ring to it: Visualization: The Art of Numbers and the Psychology of Persuasion.
First of all, that name is way too f’kin’ long to fit on a notebook using my trusty label maker. Secondly, THE ART OF NUMBERS.
I, if you’ve seen my latest TikTok, am an Asian who cannot math. People around me assume that because my mom is 1. from Vietnam and 2. she holds an accounting degree (like actual accounting with numbers and maths and shit, don’t let your mind wander here. FAMILY FRIENDLY!) I, too, am a whiz at math. And I was. Up until I met Algebra 1 and 2 in 8th and 10th grades, respectively. I couldn’t wrap my head around formulas and the intersection of letters with numbers…the last time I did anything with mathematics was my senior year in college where every week the professor would ask me, the only senior in the class, the same question: Why are you in my class? or Why are you taking probability in your last semester? Prior to that, I hadn’t seen math in a classroom since my junior year of high school when I took college prep trigonometry/pre-calc.
All this to say, I know there are mathematicians and people who just love numbers and listen—yo go, Glen Coco. You go….
But I was terrified that I was about to risk my almost-4.0 GPA (I lost my 4.0 with Marketing Strategy—you know who you are, prof) over a MATH COURSE.
But then again—statistics. Data. I can handle INFORMATION.
And for whatever reason, my brain did not retain the full name of the course. That beautiful medley of words that sounds like it would look great in bold or some sort of roman serif on the front of a hardcover textbook, 20-chapters deep. Yet, I continued to address it as The Joy of Numbers like it was some discount Bob Ross spin-off of his beloved The Joy of Painting series frequently airing on PBS or the now defunct NJN.
And then, of course, every time I’d remind myself of the ACTUAL name of the course, the last half of it, the Psychology of Persuasion, brought back horrible flashbacks of the worst class I had during this whole adventure: Persuasion and the Marketplace.
While I earned an A in the course, hacking with the metaphorical educational machete through the thick, dense jungle of vines that were the professor’s questions and responses and requirements that raised nothing but more questions, lack of responses and just overall confusion, it was a course I was angry about taking. I can discuss the several reasons why in another blog post, or maybe even a podcast episode (spoiler!) later on, but the idea is that if this new, final course was going to be similar to the first persuasion course I took, well… I’ll just go home. It’s OK. I don’t need my degree that bad.
Anyway, the final time I reminded myself of the name, I started to panic. Ah shit, it’s time to take that dreaded math course.
Thankfully, I was told by the prof that there is almost no math involved. From other students who had already taken the course, I was told it’s a semester of learning a new program, essentially.
Very good. I enjoy learning new things on the computer. But then panic set in again. WHAT IF THIS PROGRAM IS ABOUT MATH? But the teacher said no math, so…
It was a huge learning curve for me. I usually pick up on things quickly, but I think part of the personal issue was the class size was huge this semester. I showed up late to class on the first day (which became a trend, as it was my first and only semester having to travel from somewhere that wasn’t home while working FT at Accolade). When I strolled into the classroom, I was suddenly drowning in a sea of 42 other students, only four of whom I actually knew because they were in STAM, too, and three of them were part of the Smart Ones project I posted about a couple years back.
This class size took the cake with the size of our Consumer and Buyer Behavior class coming in second with a whopping 38 students. Insane!
Week after week, my brain became frustrated with hearing the buzzing of chatter from the left side of the room combined with all of the “can you show that again?” “how did you do that?” and other like questions also coming from the same side. I wasn’t upset that questions were being asked, especially to see how something was done. I was peeved that people were not paying attention, and then asking how to do something that was JUST demonstrated. I always managed to sit up front unless I was late on a day where magically everyone showed up to class in person, in which case I ended up in the back, but would always find a way to catch up.
Sometimes having that interruption during a step of someone asking to see it again regardless of it being done literally seconds before asking caused me to miss the next step because I would stop paying attention for what I thought was only a minute while the instructor would repeat himself. I dared not raise my hand to ask how he got there. Instead. I tried to figure it out or whisper to a friend, “I missed that step, did you see it?” and if they could explain it in less than 10 seconds I was golden. Otherwise, I would just stop and wait because I knew the whole exercise would be done again.
I liked the class a lot. I liked our prof, Joshua Tapley, a lot. He’s down to earth, nice, very accommodating, understanding, and quite helpful. I think there’s only one time he said something in class that sort of pressed the wrong button for me and initiated a verbal reaction aloud in class, but other than that, it was Gucci.
As for the program we were learning… It was Tableau. I never heard of it until dawn drew near for this course to start. I was afraid it was a math program. Let me tell you…
It is. But not in the sense that you MUST use formulas to traverse through the project you’re working on. Quite the contrary. You can find ways around it. Formulas only enhance your journey and allow you to do things that may be a bit more advanced. In fact, there’s some sort of familiarity for me in seeing boolean can be used. If anything, Tableau is very much a tool for non-designers to design. It lacks some of the vanilla tools that you would find in standard creative/design software (like rulers and guides, but you can toggle a grid!) as well as some key shortcuts and abilities (like being able to duplicate objects/charts), but it offers some other really neat features like being able to place objects within containers or freely as you wish. The latter is more my speed because I can finesse using the X, Y coordinates where necessary but have the flexibility to place things exactly where I want them.
While some of my frustration came from the class dynamic and atmosphere, the rest of it came from not being able to understand what I felt were basic functions in the program. While working on homework, I found myself grunting at the computer and using colorful language that’s normally reserved for my hour-long drive to/from my job’s office in Plymouth Meeting, PA. This is where my professor stepped in.
May he be blessed with the warmth and light of a thousand suns for years to come in times of freezing temperatures and darkness because this man literally spent 2 hours on a Zoom call with me one day over a weekend because I had no dang clue what I was even doing. I would never expect that from an educator, especially on a weekend when that may be their only time off. I was very grateful.
Also, shoutout to his patience because while Moses parted the Red Sea, I broke the dam and flooded his inbox with questions and “OMG SOS” type messages. Being one of 43 students in a single class, I honestly would be so annoyed.
As part of the class’ itinerary, we needed to work on a final project that basically showed how far we came from the first assignment where we all just…winged it and we weren’t allowed to use Tableau. Fine by me because I was still under the impression Tableau was about math and merci, non.
I was a tad stumped on what I would do my final project on. We needed to find our own data (or create it) and build a dashboard that presented key information in our findings that told a captivating story about whatever we were presenting. I eventually settled on doing something with Pokémon cards. At the time, the newest ENG (English( expansion, Evolving Skies, dropped. Prior to its release, the JP (Japanese) version of the set saw its launch. The expansion was actually split into two (as I would find out late in my research): Skyscraping (or Towering) Perfection and Blue Sky Stream. For the sake of my little finances, I decided I would purchase booster boxes (basically retail display boxes) to try and see if I could complete a full card set. By purchasing JP cards rather than ENG, my wallet would be able to breathe. While JP booster boxes have less cards, their full sets tend to be smaller, too, thus making it cheaper to buy.
I purchased two booster boxes at $64 a pop. Skyscraping Perfection had a base set of 67 cards and 23 “secret rare” cards. My goal was really to try and collect as much of the full set as possible, but realistically the bar should have been set at being able to complete the base set. I’ll explain why later on in this post.
Fortunately, the foundation of my data was able to be sourced from a couple of websites: Pokécollector and Bulbapedia. What’s nice is that the data starts off in Excel. I know how to use it. Kind of. Like, I can put values into the cells and use the formatting options to make it look like a million bucks. Novice at best. Don’t ask me to use formulas, though. That was a weak point for me in Media Planning and just in life.
What I did love was how the spreadsheets were parsed in Tableau. I also loved how I could add any information I wanted. I was invested in typing in true/false (and later finding out I could give my carpal tunnel a break by not even typing “false” and just leaving the cell blank) and incorporating as much information as I could about every single card in the set. I went as far as including the Japanese names for each Pokémon and trainer card.
But I ran into a LOT of obstacles. For starters, for anyone who’s familiar with Pokémon TCG, you know that every. Single. Expansion… literally, EVERY SINGLE ONE, has cards that show up in multiple forms, but have the same name/title. For example, in Skyscraping Perfection, there were, like, four versions of the Schoolgirl card, but they were all called Schoolgirl. There was the uncommon Schoolgirl, the rare, the rainbow rare, and the golden rare. I had to brainstorm and figure out how to label these so they still made sense and could be differentiated. I had to keep it consistent as well. And, of course, one of the minor issues I was not able to correct was the math in my data. The card count in some of the graphs do not equal the proper amount, and neither Josh or I could figure out why. It’s not super important, though.
Josh sent me a few links at one point for some dashboards he found on Tableau Public’s website relating to what I said I wanted to do. There were some really cool ideas people executed in their work, one of which was including images that would show up when you clicked on a name. I believe I saw it in a dashboard that was laid out like a Pokédex. To me, that was genius. I was seeing the power of Tableau in real time and that was really, really neat. I mentioned this to Josh and he helped me make that happen. Of course, there were some bugs we needed to work out with that among other things in my dashboard. I still have a headache to this day from banging my head on my keyboard every time I would fix something, but break something else. (Which was literally every time.)
Before building the final project, we were told to outline it. This could be done in a variety of ways—creating a mockup in some design software or creative tool like Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Paint, Powerpoint, etc. We could also describe it in text or develop a map or tree. I chose the visual route, of course, employing the knowledge I have as a designer in my favorite tool in all of Adobe’s history—Illustrator.
My final result ended up looking very close to what I laid out in Illy, which is what held my grade up for the project. I was able to source every single card image from Pokécollector’s website (with some minor editing being done in Photoshop), an image of the title Pokémon, Duraludon, from the depths of Google Images, with other small graphical elements created by yours truly (like the Poké Balls and background) to round it out.
The visuals I’m proud of. The time I put into it? Worth it. However, I hit a creative roadblock with making my story super interesting. Honestly, who cares if you can pull a full set with two booster boxes? I think what would have been more attention grabbing is seeing if I could pull the most expensive card (worth about $120+ USD, if I remember correctly) and what the odds are. Or, are common cards actually common? What element type is favored in card pulls versus in the set count? I dunno, there are a variety of other things I could have focused on, but I think I was just so overwhelmed that I felt like that what I did choose was the safest bet for what i was trying to do.
If there’s anything I would go back and change about my final, I would consider laying it out wider rather than taller, maybe in some sort of desktop resolution (i dunno, 1024 x 768?) or whatever. While I had this idea that I could print it out as a poster (sans interactivity), it’s kind of a pain to scroll down…though scrolling across may not be much better.
For the record, I did not pull the entire set in two booster boxes. I didn’t even pull the entire base set. I think I’m missing two cards, and just about all but one of the secret rares (I pulled a Golden Cresselia, which I highlighted in the dashboard). Remember earlier when I said I should have set the bar lower? Late in my research, I found some information about pulling cards in this set. In a booster box, you are only (unofficially) guaranteed one secret rare.
Each booster box contains 30 packs. Each pack has 5 cards. That means of 150 cards, you will only find 1 secret rare. One. Uno. Một. Un. Eins. However, you will find multiple other rares…but the secret ones? Good luck. I never had a chance to even come CLOSE to completing the full set.
Regardless, I enjoyed opening the cards. It took me three hours on a Friday night to open and record each one in my spreadsheet. Eventually, I set up a binder for the set, and what was left over is still in my possession. I handed off some of them to my boss’ son who enjoys Pokémon as well. Some of the rare duplicates will be looked at again and possibly sent off to PSA for grading at some point before being listed for sale. Some may just go up for sale.
If you’re interested in checking out my final dashboard, I uploaded it to Tableau Public. You can access it here. It still has a few bugs, but unless you’re well aware of what they are, you may not notice them. •