Support Analytics Blog

I borrowed the illustrations below from the latest copy of Information Management in an article by Aaron Hursman.

The first info graphic below shows how the stop light-type chart tends to distract by showing too much.  You can make out the red circle, but since there is so many other colors and circles, it distracts from being able to focus on a few important points.

On the other hand, the graphic below shows how efficient it can be to highlight only exceptions or radical numbers.  The downside is you lose the yellow colored circles that may denote a potential problem.  One solution for this would be to have it interactive where one could select Red, green or yellow.  I know this isn’t a real example, but sticking with the concept, this method can really help to key the audience in on specific areas you want them to focus on.

With the visualization below, you can see how the artificial glare in the pie chart distracts the reader and actually makes it look like it’s a segment or grouping.  Adding “flash” or other bling to charts is rarely a good idea.  One other quick question, where is the slice for “Closeout” in blue?

I would agree that the graph is an improvement over the table below.  However, I’m still not a huge fan of the bullet charts when you put many of them together.  I just find myself going back and forth from the chart to the legend.  Maybe it’s just me with a bad short term memory.  This chart is good for an analyst, but for someone at a higher level it may be too much.  Actually, I favor percentages when illustrating a comparison to prior year or plan.  The takeaway here is that the chart is better than the table, but know your audience and try to add value by pointing out the areas of excellence or concern for the audience.

[Source 1, Source 2]

A big thank you to Support Analytics’ newest advertising partner – TIBCO Spotfire.  If you are involved with data visualization and read most of the popular blogs and books on the subject, you have probably seen TIBCO Spotfire in action.

With TIBCO Silver Spotfire you can be viewing interactive dashboards in your browser or on an ipad in minutes.  Best of all, they are offering a free trial with no obligation.  Check out there offer by clicking here.  They also run a great blog on business intelligence and analytics called Trends and Outliers.

I wanted to give the readers here a peek at the article Support Analytics wrote for the Spotfire blog.  Spotfire is a leader in the data visualization space.  If you are interested, the blog post discusses two critical parts to data visualization and analytics and can be found here.

A special thank you goes to Elissa Fink of Tableau for providing me with a demo of Tableau Public.  With being a big fan of Tableau desktop, it should be no surprise that Tableau Public impressed me for many of the same reasons I like the desktop version.

Today is the official release of Tableau Public and the latest version of Tableau Desktop 5.1.  Below you will find some quotes from today’s press release:

SEATTLE, WA, February 11, 2010 – Tableau Software today launched a new product that brings public data to life on the web. Tableau Public, available for free, lets anyone who posts content to the web easily create interactive visualizations and publish them to blogs, web sites, Twitter feeds or anywhere online. Instead of viewing static charts or tables, Tableau Public lets people answer questions and share data interactively on the web.

Current alternatives for sharing data online are clumsy. Typically, data is pasted into tables and lists, or posted as files or catalogs that are difficult to use. Available at Tableaupublic.com, Tableau Public is helping to solve this challenge – bringing data to life on the web for ordinary people. With its interactive visualizations and dashboards, Tableau Public helps people start conversations based on data that is useful, beautiful and shareable. No special plug-ins are required, all that’s needed to see and use the data is a web browser.

In conjunction with the general availability of Tableau Public, the company is also releasing today Version 5.1 of its Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server product suite. Version 5.1 provides more analytic richness, better publishing, and increased scalability and performance. Analytical features include reference bands that provide context to a user’s analysis, bullet charts to evaluate related data, and intelligent data labels to call out the most critical data. New publishing features include rich formatting, streamlined toolbar design, more filter options, and a flexible layout.

I have yet to try out the newest version, 5.1, but I did see that it will have the ability to produce Stephen Few’s famous Bullet Charts without any tricky workarounds.  I can tell you that I’m excited to start using version 5.1.

(more…)

Not too long ago, I got a tip from someone on Twitter with a link to a site called Verifiable.com.  Upon further investigation, I learned that this site is similar to Manyeyes.com in that you can upload a data set and, using the tools on the site, create data visualizations. 

At first glance, the site seems somewhat plain.  After digging into what the site is about, I quickly learned that they utilize sound and popular theory in the data visualization field.  On their about page, the first line that explains the features is:

“A clean, low-chartjunk philosophy — no shadows, no pie charts, no 3-D bar graphs, just the ink you need. [verifable.com]”

Well, simply reading that peaked my interest because they use similar principles that I follow when creating charts/graphs.  No frills.  I like the fact that you can create charts that don’t have excessive grid lines, shadows, weak labeling and limited charting options.  Below you will see a few examples from their site.  You can also follow the links to see the visualizations in an interactive environment.  As you will see, there is a lot of data (hover over), many different options and some good visuals.  Granted some of the charts I had no idea what they were trying to show, but in general this site gives you a seemingly good tool to apply charting/graphing best practices.

[Interactive version]

[Interactive version]

Verifiable also offers a Pro version of their tool where you can keep your data and visualizations private and receive premium support.  The cost is minimal with the Pro version going for $29.95/year. 

I didn’t try to upload a data set to give the site a full trial, but it definitely looks interesting.  I am not sure how much demand there is for online data visualization using a tool like Verifiable.

The most recent copy of Information Management had the image below on page 8.  What’s funny is the person figure on the left looks like it’s wearing pants.  Oh wait, those aren’t pants, the blue is part of the data visualization.  The person on the right looks to be wearing orange work boots or ski boots for that matter.  The article by Julie Langenkamp is interesting and discusses how small vendors tend to rank much higher than large vendors in product support and other areas.

[image source]

[image source]

It appears that small vendors scored better than large vendors in every single category of complaints as shown in the chart above.  In the chart below, you will see that small vendors appeared to provide more benefit to the customer/client than large or medium vendors.

[image source]

There’s a lot more to the article if you are interested in business intelligence. 

Question: Would you pay $1,295 to be able to create this heat map (below) from an Excel spreadsheet?   If so, a company called Lab Escape has a product that will do the trick.  Oh yeah, if you want to be able to view [interactively] the output of the standard version software, you need the viewer version that only runs a mere $495.

Taken directly from their site, they claim the benefits of heat maps are:

• Increase Agility – Improve business agility through quicker analysis, better decisions and more effective communication.
• Reduce Risk – Rapidly identify trouble spots, before they are out of control
• Maximize Value – Ensure that attention and resources go where they bring the best return.
• Identify Opportunities – Discover underlying trends that point to high-value opportunities.

[source]

I don’t really mean to pick on this company; it’s just the one that I got an email about today.  I think the power of heat maps is actually part of its ineffectiveness, which is too much data.  The benefit of a heat map is suggested to be that you can fit a lot of information in a relatively small visualization.  If you were to create the same data using a bar chart, it would take up a few pages.  The downside of this heat map is there is too much going on with it.  The only information I can make out of it are the large outliers.  Ironically, the same is probably true if you were to create a visualization using a bar chart.  At least you would save $1295 by using a standard bar chart in Excel versus this software.

This heat map shows a ton of data where size and color of the boxes matter.  Intuitively, the bigger the box, the larger the number must be, right?  But what the heck to the colors stand for?  I cannot tell.  Also, note the logo images within the boxes – they make the label and value very hard to read.

Do you see value in heat maps?  Is this just a bad example that uses too many data points?  Please share your thoughts.

In just over a week, on June 1st, Stephen’s new book on data visualization for quantitative analysis will be released.  The date has not been updated at Amazon as of writing this, but was confirmed by Stephen per the last update post.  Recently, I had the chance to catch up with Stephen and we discussed the new book along with some of the great content.  The official title is: Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis.  Below are some questions I asked him and his answers. 

1. What inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired to write this book by the same thing that inspired me to write the other two: a need that wasn’t being addressed. In this particular case, the need is for people to develop data sense-making skills. People throughout organizations are responsible for this to some degree, but few have been trained. Most analyses that are done in the normal course of business can be handled using simple visual analysis techniques that anyone can learn, but few people have. They haven’t, because until now no resource existed that they could turn to. Plenty of available resources teach statistics, but nothing teaches the simple and practical methods that rely on our eyes to explore and make sense of quantitative data.

2. What makes this book different from "Show Me The Numbers"?

Show Me the Numbers focuses on effective ways to present quantitative information using tables and graphs. Now You See It focuses on effective ways to explore and make sense of quantitative data. Before you can present data, you must figure out what it means. This new book will help people discover and understand the stories that live in their data more quickly and thoroughly.

3. A common question about your past books, what software did you use to create the visualizations in this book?

I used Excel to create most of the examples in this book, not because it’s great visual analysis software—it isn’t—but because everyone has Excel and I wanted most of the analytical methods that are taught in the book to be accessible to everyone. Probably about a third of the examples illustrate visualizations and techniques that require better visual analysis tools than Excel, including Tableau, Spotfire, Panopticon, JMP, Advizor Analyst, and R. I included these to show people how much more they could do if they had a better tool. The techniques that require better software aren’t difficult, but they either involve graphs that aren’t available in Excel (for example, box plots) or ways to dynamically interact with data that Excel doesn’t support.

4. The Amazon description says it’s valuable for those trying to understand business data.  Would those outside of the corporate/business sector benefit from this book?

The data analysis techniques that I teach in this book apply to data of all types, not just business data. Just as in Show Me the Numbers, most of the examples that you’ll find in Now You See It involve business data because most of my readers are businesspeople, but everyone who works with quantitative data in the non-profit sector, government, academia, or anywhere else will find this book easy to understand and applicable to their work.

5. What specific question or problem does this book help solve for a reader?

The primary questions that Now You See It addresses are:

• What aptitudes, attitudes, and skills are needed to analyze data effectively?
• What are the basic types of quantitative data analysis?
• For each type of analysis, what are the most effective graphs for visualizing the data?
• For each type of analysis, what patterns in the data are most meaningful?
• For each type of analysis, what are the most effective ways to interact with the data to bring the meaningful patterns to light?
• What are the most effective ways to navigate through the process of analysis?
• What should software tools do to help us to explore and analyze data effectively?
• How should software be designed and function to support us in these useful ways?
• What are the most promising trends that will take visual analytics to the next level of productivity?

6. If someone doesn’t use Microsoft Excel, should they pass on this book?

Assuming that you have some software tool available to you that can be used to view, explore, and analyze data visually that is as good as Excel or better, this book was written for you. If you don’t currently have such a tool, this book will reveal what you need in a tool, so you can get a good one and get started.

7. The title of the book, “Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis” suggests that this book may be an introduction to data visualization.  If someone is at a more advanced level, will they benefit from this book?

People who are already experts in visual analytics will already know much of what I teach in this book. No one who exclusively uses Excel for data analysis is already an expert in visual analytics, however, because Excel doesn’t support many of the most useful and powerful visualizations and functions of visual analysis. Even most people who are well trained in statistics will benefit from this book, because most courses in statistics don’t teach many of the analysis techniques that are necessary when you need to explore and examine trends, patterns, and exceptions with your eyes, not just as a number produced by a statistical formula.

8. Who designed the cover, it’s really exquisite?

I’m glad you like the cover. As you can imagine, as someone who’s involved in visual design, I want book covers that emulate the design principles I teach but are also compelling in a way that says “Pick me up and take a look” when they catch people’s eyes. I think Keith Stevenson accomplished this beautifully with his cover design. Keith and I became acquainted originally as we exchanged opinions about wine in a local wine bar. He works as a graphic designer at the University of California, Berkeley.

9. What’s one thing that the average person doesn’t know about Stephen Few that you can share?

Perhaps the fact that people are most surprised to learn about me is that I started my professional life as a minister. My personal and professional journey since then has taken a long and winding road. What remains of those days, I suppose, is the fiery passion that I bring to my work.

10. Is there going to be a book signing tour?

I’m still waiting for my invitation from Oprah. Until she puts me on her book list, I’ll continue to assume that a live tour would mostly give me a chance to catch up on my reading. Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea.

Related Books:

1. Show Me The Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, Stephen Few
2. Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, Stephen Few

There are referral links within this post to Amazon. However, there is no endorsement from Stephen Few for this post or any reference to his books.

Project Gemini is due to be released with the 2010 version of Excel as a free add-on.  The two videos below are a little dry and hard to see.  But there are a few things that caught my attention very quickly.  Also, Mr.Excel did a podcast on this a little while back in episode #975.  The things I liked were:

• Ability to slice and dice using 20 million rows of data on a fairly basic PC (not server)
• The other was how quickly you can filter on 20 million rows
• Create Pivot tables quickly with 20 million rows and on the fly
• It’s free and will be included in Excel 2010

Here is another demo using Gemini and SharePoint.

[thanks to SmartData Collective]

What do you think? Do you think this is a huge breakthrough or just Microsoft/Excel getting with the times?

Smart bridge technology – it’s unfortunate this wasn’t in place before the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  When you think of data analysis, information and data visualization, and dashboards, it doesn’t have to be limited to business and corporations.  With nearly $500 Billion potentially allocated to infrastructure in President Obama’s stimulus bill, the Department of Transportation and technology companies could be teaming up to bring us "smart" bridges that will alert us to potential hazardous conditions.

[source]

Some of the data provided by the sensors (per the article) in the bridge that could be presented in a dashboard type display is:

• Concrete temperature
• Vibrations
• Corrosion
• Ice buildup
• Traffic monitoring

Actionable analytics is what helps set corporations ahead of the pack.  There’s no reason we can’t bridge (pun intended) the gap to bring better technology and analytics to infrastructure and other non business sectors.

One of the enhancements to current bridges is a sensor that activates sprinkler heads in the pavement that would spread an anti-icing (potassium acetate) solution to prevent the bridge surface from forming ice.  This technology could make the signs reading "bridges freeze first" obsolete.

Fun fact: $500 Billion is more than the amount spent to build the entire Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.