Sometimes There Really is an Easy Button

The road to Tableau was an eye opening experience for me.  Noah really nailed it, there is nothing I couldn't really do before Tableau, but it just is so fast to do an amazing visual analysis that allows me to see opportunities, that I am so much more effective.

There’s absolutely nothing that Tableau can do that I couldn’t do before, but that’s exactly the point: it lets me do the exact same stuff much faster, cutting down on the parts of my job that aren’t the most exciting and leaving more time for more valuable work. So far, the things I use Tableau for take less than half as long as doing them with my more familiar toolset, and I end up with the same results.

Where DO HR's Come From?

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Critical importance of data visualization

Clear presentation of data using graphics are critical to how fast people can understand the information and how comfortable they are in interpreting the information.

Great article using the Edward Tufte visualization of the data from the '86 Space Shuttle crash.  The engineers were very concerned about the temperature on the day of the launch, which they felt heightened the risk of the O-rings being damaged.

The engineers presented all the data to the decision makers through multiple reports and with the data spread out on many different pages.  Of course it was hard to put all the data together and understand the severity of the issue.

The actual fax of one page of the data to decision makers

As you cab see, not really something that shows the severity of the issue. 

Edward Tufte's visualization of the severity for the launch

The graph shows 2 things.  

1. The dots are previous launches and the severity of damage to the O-rings.  As the chart clearly shows the colder the temperature, the higher the risk for damage
2. The Red X marks the temperature on the day of the launch in question.  Because the temperature is used on the axis and includes the launch day, it shows how far out of the normal ranges this launch was and since the damage increases as the temperature decreases, this shows the severity in a way that would have more then likely stopped the launch on that fateful day.

Now most of us won't be presenting data that will save lives like the example above, however it really shows how a good piece of visualization shows outliers and gives the decision makers easy to understand data to make better decisions without having to go through pages of data.

Tree Maps and Tableau

I'm beginning to become a big fan of the tree map.  It is very useful to see where business is coming from.  One of the cool features in Tableau is the user can bring dates to a row and then the tree maps also act as a bar chart comparing where the business is coming from YOY.  

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Sample Tree Map from Tableau

As you can see above I can tell 2007 was my best total sales year with declining sales throughout the years.  The decline was primarily driven by Office Machines as the size of that box never returned to its largest total in 2007.  

I can see myself using this for many different dashboards and analysis in the future.  Maybe I may even use bubbles.