Where Does Inspiration Come From?

As a kid, I used to fantasize about being able to transport myself anywhere with a blink and a nod like Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie or to clean my room with the wiggle of my nose like Samantha on Bewitched or to someday have Uhura's job from Star Trek.

Yes, it did seem like Uhura was a glorified switchboard operator (an un-glorified, mind-numbingly boring job that I did eventually do), but mostly I was fascinated by the computer screens all around her.

Since that time, I've continued to pay attention to the computer screens in Sci-Fi movies (never could get too excited about the panels in Star Wars) and the ones on Star Trek have gotten more and more intricate and beautiful over the years.

It seems I'm not the only one fascinated by Sci-Fi computer screens. There's websites dedicated to this strange fetish.

Top 10 Dashboard Don'ts

10.  Don't build to committee  If a bunch of people sat around a room and drew out the dashboard on a whiteboard before you've even analyzed the data.... run screaming from the room.  This dashboard will end up being an '18 months to deployment product' and I promise you will want to slit your wrists with a spoon at some point, so pretend your hair's on fire and get out now.

Dashboard Kitsch

Kitsch (/ˈkɪtʃ/; loanword from German) is a low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural icons. Kitsch generally includes unsubstantial or gaudy works or decoration, or works that are calculated to have popular appeal.

wikipedia

A gnome or two in your garden can be cute, even enchanting. But when you have a whole herd of zombie gnomes on your lawn, you have gone to the dark side, my friend. I'm suggesting that you are dangerously close to becoming a 'Collector'.

How to Build a Dashboard

Yup.  Just like that.

Drill Down

Have you noticed how rarely you hear the term Data Mining these days? That's because a lot of people now know that it is a complex thing, and not just filtering a pivot table in Excel.

The funny thing is that 'Drill Down' is just the opposite. People ask for it - make a big deal of it - in dashboard building, not realizing that this is a simple thing in Tableau. There's a few ways to provide the 'Drill Down', but it's important to first ask what exactly do they mean by 'Drill Down'. Usually, it's one of three things:

Bad Charts Delight

I know you love them. C'mon, admit it. Pies, donuts, bubbles,... anything stacked or layered. You love 'em. We all do. There's something about these bad chart choices that are appealing to us. If they didn't tickle our insides we wouldn't see so many of them on infographics and dashboards.

Yet we know (yes, we do) that these are bad choices for conveying information. Our job as dashboard builders is to create a cohesive and accurate information message that can stand alone in a room without us there to interpret.

Are You a Tabaholic?

Kathy Sierra, 2005 click to read more

Someone recently implied, quite publicly, that Tableau users are 'dumb'. I'm not even going to provide the link to the interview because this type of nonsense marketing is becoming more common. Get quoted saying something negative about Tableau and hopefully you'll get people to check out your product. Is that really 'smart' marketing?

Kathy Sierra wrote about this phenomenon a while back:

You don't really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of "drinking the koolaid." You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it's the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion... or rather passion in the hate dimension. If you create passionate users, you have to expect passionate detractors. You should welcome their appearance in blogs, forums, and user groups. It means you've arrived. Forget the tipping point--if you want to measure passion, look for the koolaid point.

Steal and Nod

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation ~ MASON COOLEY

To better understand technique, many art students will at some time be given the task of replicating the masters. It's a great way to learn and is useful for learning dashboard design in Tableau as well.

The Tableau Public community share an incredible amount of tips and how-to's as well as some amazingly innovative and clever tricks. A lot of people I talk to don't realize that you can download most of the workbooks people have posted (just look for the download note on the bottom right of the viz) and that the author knows that their work is out there for all to see and have graciously agreed to share it with you. You can open the workbook and look behind the curtain to see how they worked their magic. It's not considered stealing, so long as you give credit (the nod).

So next time you see a viz of the day or a blog post with a cool viz, download it and try to replicate it with your data. It's a great exercise - you will find that your learning grows in leaps and bounds this way. I think we all learn something much better when we've struggled with it, rather than just having someone show or tell us how.

Why So Blue?

I don't know if you've noticed, but I love blue.

In the olden days, before the internet and according to my son, when I lived in a cave and cooked over a pit with the newly discovered fire, we did all our charts in shades of grey.  Because only the execs had color printers.   As a result, people were so excited to create some colorful reports for the big giant heads that things got a little out of control. Some of the reports were so horrific in color, that I think they may have caused color blindness.

As a result, when I was asked to use color, I used blue.  Blue is a reasonable choice - almost everyone likes blue - both men and women, and it's associated with calm and clarity. It doesn't conflict with other colors or make a statement. Also, if someone chooses to print your blueful report on a black and white printer, you can pretty much trust the shades of grey that will come out.

5 Tips to Good Vizzin'

Before Tableau, I made a lot of dashboards in Excel. It has been quite difficult to free myself from the constraints that Excel (or other standard tools) forced upon me when it came to storytelling with data. Let me explain.

In the past, with other tools, I would envision the outcome first and work backwards.  Often I would be specifically asked for a certain type of chart showing certain information; sometimes I would be asked to investigate a problem, but I would still jump to the type of chart(s) I needed first and then go about getting my data into the state needed to put it in those charts.

New Year Revolutions

Good times and bum times, I’ve seen ‘em all

And, my dear, I’m still here

Flush velvet sometimes

Sometimes just pretzels and beer, but I’m here

I’ve run the gamut, A to Z

Three cheers and dammit, C’est la vie

I got through all of last year, and I’m here

Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here

Look who’s here, I’m still here

  - Stephen Sondheim

It has been a wonderful year. Nothing got broke that couldn't be fixed,
no one went to jail and no one died. The world kept turning and my family was funnier than ever.
This has been my standard for success since raising a teenager.

UBC Magicians

Click to visit site

Today I was invited to talk with grad students in a course on Information Visualization and Visual Analytics  as part of  the Magic program at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  I had met the Director of the program (and CiFER Researrch), Dr. Vicki Lemieux, at the Tableau 8 Roadshow here in Vancouver in the spring and she had asked if I would come speak to her class about working in this field.  Vicki is one of those truly precious professors who are not only experts in their field and love it, but also love teaching and are brilliant at it.  She explained how the class runs; she usually presents some new information and then the students work in groups to further explore and share their new found knowledge.

Magic stands for Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre.  This is a great program which also offers students the opportunity to work with local business and government organizations:

Hey Girl, didn't I see you at the Tableau Customer Conference 2013?

I just got home from a crazy wonderful week at the Tableau Customer Conference in Washington DC and I am bursting with so much information and excitement.  Too much to talk about in one post.

There was one thing though, an impression, and it was noticeable. There were so many women at this conference. All kinds of women; women in suits, young geeky women, women from every culture, even women with grey hair.

Why is this a big deal? Because usually at tech conferences men outnumber the women noticeably.  I can't guess at the normal ratio, but it's probably the same as in any IT department (5ish to 1?). One of the first tweets of the conference made note of the fact that the ratio there was probably 1:1. And it looked that way. People mentioned it and wondered why.

Deep thoughts...

Seems to me, there's a lot of deep thoughts flying about Twitter.  Lots of quotes, and inspirational one-liners.  Twitter is perfect for that I guess - short and sweet.

Unfortunately, those things don't work for me.  My contrary brain always rebels when I read them - even if they are good advice.  It's not that I don't like them, heck I'd throw one out at a cocktail party if I ever went to a cocktail party.  But usually when I read them I secretly think of some sarcastic quip that I have to keep to myself because sharing would be unprofessional.

Maybe I'm just not that deep.  These are the daily inspirational thoughts I think ... of doing...

Thanks to all the vizwizards who figured out the Calendar trick:
Clint at Instant Cognition
Dustin at Interworks
Andy at VizWiz

The Interactive Dashboard Blues: getting users to play

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

I'm a big believer that work should be play.  I love what I do, I even do it as a hobby.  So when I present a dashboard to someone and see that look of Office-Disguised-Horror (it looks unimpressed - arms crossed, leaned back, prove it to me, body language ), I'm saddened.  To me, it suggests an experience or environment where not knowing something might be punished.

I find that interactive dashboards are more likely to induce this reaction.  Many people will just stare, not touch.

I hate to say it, but it may be a generational thing.  I watch my 70 year old father on the computer and he does pretty well for someone who was first introduced to a keyboard at age 60.  But he is afraid to push buttons and often gets lost on the web.

Then there's my 2 year old grandson who zooms around on an iPad so fast I can't figure out what he's doing.  He is absolutely fearless and doesn't care if he breaks it.  And yet, he hasn't.  He always manages to 'find his way back'.

Top 3 Tableau Fears

Yup.  It exists.  And it comes in many forms.  I've done a lot of Tableau presentations to managers and analysts over the past couple of years and the same concerns keep cropping up.

The Elusive Single Version of the Truth (the Sasquatch of data fear)

This one is usually expressed by  upper management frustrated with being confused about the numbers they are being presented with and having to ask for all the details about the data in order to trust that taking action on those numbers will be worthwhile and/or safe.

Viz Policing a Rachel Maddow Chart

Rachel Maddow's show is one of the few things I enjoy watching on television.  Tonight, while she was interviewing Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, I became seriously distracted by this chart.  I kept looking at it expecting it to be telling me more than it did.

As I continued to watch the interview, my mind kept obsessing over that dang chart.  I wonder, is it necessary for this medium to bad chart - does television require a certain amount of chart bling in order to keep their audience?  Or is it that the graphics have to match the set or the celebrity brand?  Do these shows follow certain branding rules for all graphics?

So I re-charted.  It only took 10 minutes and it didn't interfere with the rest of my life, so no, I do not have a vizing addiction.

The Visual Design Process

Andy Kirk Viz Marathon London 2011

View more PowerPoint from Andy Kirk

"BUT WHAT'S THE BLEEDING STORY???!!!!"

I have purposely screamed that question in homage to all those Senior Executives and Managers who have been presented with yet another aggressively colourful table of numbers that they are expected to analyze and interpret for themselves.  I apologize for my fellow analysts for their ignorance and inability to provide you with insight and information.  I use the term ignorance in its truest form; to be uninformed or in a state of unawareness - not stupid.

Why I Love Tableau

I love Tableau because they took the time to design a solution that allows me, a plain old analyst, to produce reports that help management make sound decisions on business practices.  Now let me define 'plain old analyst':

Masters in Demography.  

Advanced statistical research

Published in peer-reviewed journals

Courses in SPSS (grad school), Excel, Access, VBA, SQL, and SSAS (in that order).  

I am not a DBA or a Business Systems Analyst.  I do not work in IT.  And I'm not that old.

            

Disclaimer:  This is not intended as a braggy or defensive rant; rather I hope that by understanding who the average Tableau analyst user is, you will understand our passion for this product. 

UK Foreign Office Vid/Viz

This post has nothing to do with Tableau, but I thought this was such an interesting video that I had to share.  These things inspire me and perhaps they will inspire you too.

I'm not sure why the UK Foreign Office created this video; to illustrate the breadth and seriousness of their services in hopes that they will receive fewer silly requests, to prove to the UK population that their government departments are utilizing public funds wisely, or to simply promote their services?  I do know that I was impressed with the work done by this office.