visual analysis

Millions and millions served by Tableau Public

August 5, 2010

Tableau Public’s score so far reads like one of those old McDonald’s marquees: 4.5 million people have visited data visualizations hosted by the site, says Tableau Software VP of marketing Elissa Fink. More than 30,000 visualizations — “vizes” — have been published. The most popular of all, says Elissa, have been the ones about homes, [...]

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Tableau caught them looking

August 4, 2010

Wipe away that tear you have shed for BI marketing. Take heart in this: The golden oldies — those tired verses like “faster, better decisions” — have never come closer to receding into the support roles where they belong. A new strategy has been proving itself able to hook even onlookers who swore they really [...]

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Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow

March 19, 2010

When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department. He was frank [...]

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Be a strategist, not a “geek”

December 22, 2009

Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”

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Stalking the why: selling visual analysis

October 21, 2009

How do you show the value of visual analysis to business people? Dan Murray can show it in demos, but he keeps looking for the “magic dust” that explains in a snap. He sees visual analysis as a key part of low-cost business intelligence at small- and medium-sized organizations — and he’s set out with [...]

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Visual analysis is pragmatic, not just “pretty”

September 17, 2009

So many of us who feel drawn to visual analysis can’t understand why everyone can’t see the value. “Pretty pictures,” the skeptics mutter. On Eager Eyes, Robert Kosara makes important points that I haven’t seen before. Toward the end of his post he writes, “We need a new term.” He rejects the aged and indefinite [...]

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A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”

July 15, 2009

Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.” The question, though, is who the “you” is.

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Dave Wells’ prescription for the incurious

May 3, 2009

Former TDWI education director Dave Wells keeps running into users whose BI reports might as well be printed. These users simply accept the data as presented and don’t ask questions. That’s nothing new, of course. The difference is that Dave has a way to deal with it. I caught part of his session today at [...]

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Data intimacy

February 25, 2009

Long before Scott Davis made the self-service ETL tool he calls Lyza, he tried to find out how analysts really work. He remembers in particular the woman in a focus group who said, “I want to stay close to the data.” He didn’t understand at first. The data was right in front of her, neatly [...]

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Mashed data visualization for holiday analysts

December 5, 2008

Among the visarazzi— data visualization’s foot soldiers, scientists and evangelists—”chart junk” is a no-no. If you make a bar chart about trees, for example, don’t for god sakes actually show drawings of trees. That would be silly. However, the visarazzi probably don’t mean to prohibit chart junk food.

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