topic Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age in Contests Gallery

Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:35:23 GMT

My goal of this analysis was to take viewers on a journey of how love evolves - from dating apps to weddings and honeymoons - all while making the data simple, clear, and easy to understand.

I used Power BI purely as the visualization tool. Everything you see was built using Power BI’s default visuals - no third-party or custom visuals were used. This was an intentional choice to highlight the value of Power BI straight out of the box.

1. First Impressions Matter

I started by exploring how people feel about dating apps - because swiping is easy, but finding love isn’t always that simple. I broke down the experiences by gender and income to see who’s having a great time and who’s just over it. My goal was to show that dating apps aren’t a one-size-fits-all experience, and first impressions can make or break the journey.

2. From Matches to Meetups

Once I understood how people felt about dating apps, I wanted to see who’s actually making it from a match to a real-life date. I looked at different generations and how much time they spend swiping, because let’s be honest - some are searching for love, while others are just scrolling for fun.

3. The Price of Saying 'I Do'

After dating comes commitment, so I shifted the focus to weddings and how much they actually cost. I wanted to see how spending habits have changed over time and which generation is splurging the most on their big day.

4. Romance, Relaxation & Room Service

No love story is complete without a honeymoon, so I wrapped up the journey by looking at where newlyweds go to celebrate. I explored top destinations, how long couples honeymoon, and when they travel the most. After all the wedding stress, I wanted to highlight the final chapter - where love meets adventure and relaxation (and maybe a few overpriced cocktails!)

To make the dashboard more interactive and user-friendly, I included an expand and collapse feature using the small “+” icons next to each visual title. When a user clicks on a “+” icon, it expands the section, revealing a more detailed explanation of the chart along with key takeaways.

If the user wants to minimize the details, they can simply click the “-” icon, which collapses the explanation and returns the dashboard to its cleaner, more compact view. My goal of this was to allow users to choose when they want more information and when they prefer a quick, high-level overview.

Finally, I also designed the left sidebar, which is present on every page, to provide quick and relevant key metrics based on the data shown on that specific page. Instead of overwhelming users with too much detail at first glance, the sidebar highlights the most important numbers, offering a snapshot of the insights.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback as I’m always looking for ways to improve and make data storytelling even better.

Let me know what you think! 🙂

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahir-maharaj/

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Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

fawomas702 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:54:31 GMT

Impressive build - Bookmarked this for inspiration

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Timoth193 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 01:10:17 GMT

Beautiful, clean and vibrant. Love the color scheme!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:22:42 GMT

Thank you! Appreciate the kind words 🙂

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:23:28 GMT

Thank you, glad this was useful - Good luck!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:53:18 GMT

Submission completed, slindsay - Thanks for hosting this competition!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:41:41 GMT

Wow, this looks amazing ! I love the animation you put in the plus sign. Do you mind sharing how you achieved it ? This is such impressive work !

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

slindsay — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:24:27 GMT

Sahir this is a work of art. I especially love how you gave us a bonus blog post - what a gift to the community! I can't wait to take a closer look with the judges!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:03:38 GMT

Thanks! Really appreciate that! I achieved the animation using button formatting in Power BI. I applied formatting to the button’s fill color and icon, making the plus sign change smoothly when interacted with. I wanted to make it interactive rather than having the animation run all the time, as that could be distracting 🙂

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:08:57 GMT

What a great method. I would have guessed a gif somewhere somehow. Elegant solution and thanks a lot for sharing !

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:25:13 GMT

Thanks so much Shannon! I wanted to go beyond just the main content to make sure it wasn’t just informative but actually useful. Many people think you need advanced custom visuals or extra plugins to make engaging reports, but I wanted to show that’s not the case 🙂

Hope you and the judges enjoy it!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Tutu_in_YYC — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:42:19 GMT

love this.. especially the details portion of every visuals.. Good luck Sahir!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:16:20 GMT

Thanks so much Tutu! I always try to make sure every visual in Power BI tells a clear story (explainability matters, right?) Appreciate the support, my friend! 🙂

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

chsch — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 21:22:06 GMT

I really appreciate the colors and consistency—overall, it's a well-crafted report. It would be great to see more interactivity between the charts, such as having the generations update when selecting a dating app.

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Amanda01 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 21:46:48 GMT

Woah, amazing - Definitely the best submission I have seen thus far. Its hard to believe its built in Power BI! We use Tableau but it looks nothing like this - Nice work Sahir!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

RHP — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:00:28 GMT

The visuals are well-designed, but I’m curious—what was your approach to data collection and analysis? It seems like many of the figures, such as the average wedding costs over the years, are sourced directly from different online articles rather than a structured dataset.

Were these numbers verified, aggregated, or analyzed in any way?

Some bar charts appear to be direct copies of existing visuals in the source with new formatting rather than being built from raw data, e.g. "What do newlyweds seek in a resort?".

Another noticeable aspect is the lack of interactivity—when clicking on certain elements in the visuals, the rest of the report doesn’t update accordingly, which suggests there isn’t a true dataset behind the figures.

Is there an underlying dataset driving these insights, or is the report primarily a visual presentation of pre-existing 'facts' taken from online blog posts?
While the design is polished, originality in both data analysis and insight generation is a key part of a strong Power BI report - don't we agree?

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Philip-phd — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:17:18 GMT

Congratulations, phenomenal build! I like this very much - why can't my team build things like this, haha. we are stuck on the vanilla version.

1... Did you use any custom visuals?

2... Also what version of PowerBI are you using?

Following you on LinkedIn - its clear you love what you do. All the best!

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

slindsay — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:21:53 GMT

Hi there! Thanks for looking through our entries and asking good questions. You can find the scoring criteria at aka.ms/pbidvwc. This might answer some of your questions about why things were done a certain way.

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:26:11 GMT

Anytime! If you're keen, I'd be glad to show you how it works sometime.

Re: Dating, Love & Marriage in the Digital Age

Sahir_Maharaj — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:51:07 GMT

Thanks for the kind words as I’m glad the report design stood out to you. And yes, interactive filtering is a solid idea.

Since I used multiple disjointed real-world datasets, there weren’t direct links between many sources, and I wanted to preserve their integrity rather than modify them.

Thanks again for your feedback and all the best in the competition! 🙂