December 18, 2017 Updated September 27, 2018 to include single-select questions. Special thanks to Shaelyn McCole at Hootology who suggested the topic, Ryan Gensel at CPI who came up with a wonderful enhancement to the connected dot plot, and Jeffrey Shaffer at Data Plus Science who suggested some cosmetic improvements. Note: The original blog post only [...]
November 25, 2017 Special thanks to Jeffrey Shaffer, Andy Cotgreave, and Rody Zakovich for feedback that helped improve the dashboard that appears at the end of this post. Overview It seems I’m not the only person who has been thinking about stacked bar charts (see posts from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Jonathan Schwabish, and Andy Cotgreave.) [...]
Overview Tableau’s automatic axis feature can often present problems with survey data. In this blog post we’ll look at how the problem crops up and what you can do to both fix the problem and make your visualizations more insightful. The problem with auto-adjusting bars Tableau’s automatic axis does a great job extending and contracting [...]
September 20, 2017 Overview As anyone who has read anything on my blog that relates to survey data knows, the number one impediment to success with Tableau is getting your data “just so.” Until recently I recommended two different approaches. You can either use Alteryx and have a rock solid, robust, fully-featured, (and expensive) solution [...]
Why you may be missing important insights if you only look at Percent Top 2 Boxes. August 23, 2017 Overview Anyone who has looked to this blog for insights into visualizing survey data knows that my “go to” visualization for Likert scale sentiment data is a divergent stacked bar chart (Figure 1). Figure 1 [...]
August 3, 2017 In my last blog post I pointed out that I wish I had put BANs (big-ass numbers) in the Churn dashboard featured in chapter 24 of the book (see https://www.datarevelations.com/iterate.html.) I had a similar experience this week when I revisited the Net Promoter Score dashboard from Chapter 17. I've been reading Don [...]
The Importance of feedback, iteration, and constant improvement in data visualization (and finding people that will tell you when you are full of crap.) July 5, 2017 Overview People ask me how three opinionated people can write a book like The Big Book of Dashboards together. Didn’t we disagree on things? How were we able [...]
May 10, 2017 Overview A nod of appreciation to Tom Davenport who first brought this issue to my attention. Most organizations want to wildly exceed customer expectations for all facets of all their products and services, but if your organization is like most, you're not going to be able to do this. Therefore, how should [...]
April 25, 2017 Overview I became a big fan of adding a marginal histogram to scatterplots when I first saw them applied in Tableau visualizations from Shine Pulikathara and Ben Jones. For those not familiar with how these work, consider the scatterplot shown in Figure 1 that shows the relationship between salary and age. [...]
More thoughts on the Markimekko chart and in particular how to build one in Tableau. April 4, 2017 Overview Given my reluctance to embrace odd chart types and my conviction that I would find something better I was surprised to find myself last month writing about -- and endorsing -- the Marimekko chart. If I [...]
