Overview I’m a big fan of Andy Kriebel’s and Andy Cotgreave’s Makeover Monday challenge. For those of you not familiar with this, each week Kriebel and Cotgreave find an existing visualization / data set and ask the data visualization community to come up with alternative ways to present the same data. As Cotgreave points out [...]
Overview I spend a lot of time with survey data and much of this data revolves around gauging people’s sentiments and tendencies using either a Likert Scale or a Net Promoter Score (NPS) type of thing. Examples Here’s an example of gauging sentiment using a 5-point Likert scale. Indicate how satisfied you are with the [...]
Overview Several weeks ago the data visualization community broke into justified outrage over an inexcusably misleading dual-axis chart from Americans United for Life. I plan to write an article about this and other “ethically wrong” visualizations in a few weeks but in the meantime I encourage you to read these excellent posts from Alberto Cairo [...]
Overview I recently wrote about emotional vs. accurate comparisons and several people questioned whether the word “emotional” was appropriate. (Several people questioned my assertions, too. You can read their comments here.) For this discussion I’ll use the term “engagement” in place of “emotion” and we’ll look into the challenges of creating public-facing visualizations that attract [...]
Overview Note: I based my Tableau Conference 2015 presentation on this blog post. You can download a PDF of the presentation and the Tableau packaged workbook. Click here to see a video of the presentation. Earlier this year one of my clients was updating a collection of survey data dashboards and they wanted to revisit the [...]
“With great power comes great responsibility” -- Voltaire -- Benjamin Parker (Uncle Ben from Spiderman) Overview Recently both Ryan Sleeper and Andy Kriebel blogged about donut charts in Tableau. Figure 1 -- Donut chart courtesy of Andy Kriebel While both of them cautioned about where, when, and how best to use them, I [...]
Overview A dashboard from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty has received a lot of views since it was published earlier this week and for good reason: There's a lot of important information packed into a compelling story. There's a lot I like about the dashboard but two things that I believe desperately need to [...]
Note: Since writing this post in 2014, I have, in fact, become a fan of sparklines. That said, I continue to see many instances where I think the dashboard author could present data more clearly using a different approach. Make sure to read the comments at the end of the post. I’ve never been a [...]
Overview One of the new features in Tableau 8.1 that Tableau Software is trumpeting quite a bit is one-click Box and Whisker Plot generation. While I appreciate the new functionality, this chart type doesn’t “sing” to me the as much as jittering does. Indeed, this “jittering” capability was the BIG discovery for me in 2013. [...]
If I see a visualization that is poorly designed or worse, misleading, I'm going to say something about it. I hope you will do the same. In March of 2013 Stephen Few published a scathing review of Tableau 8. Few's thesis was that Tableau had caved to marketing pressure and its new product would encourage users to [...]
