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 [...]
Or How I stopped worrying and learned to love appreciate the Marimekko March 19, 2017 Overview Readers of my blog know that I suffer from what Maarten Lambrechts calls xenographphobia, the fear of unusual graphics. I’ll encounter a chart type that I’ve not seen before, purse my lips, and think (smugly) that there is undoubtedly [...]
Overview Imagine a terrific introductory college course presented by a terrific professor. That’s the feeling I had in reading The Truthful Art, Alberto Cairo’s follow up to his first book The Functional Art. Whereas his first book took a “look at what you can and should do” approach to help people see and understand data, [...]
Overview As readers of this blog know, I have my problems with donut charts. That said, I acknowledge that they can be cool and, under certain circumstances, enormously useful. On a recent flight I was struck by how much I liked the animated “estimated time to arrival” donut chart that appeared on my personal TV [...]
Overview My obsession with finding the best way to visualize data will often infiltrate my dreams. In my slumbers I find myself dragging Tableau pills in an ongoing pursuit to come up with the ideal dashboard that shines light on whatever data set has invaded my psyche. But is the pursuit of the perfect dashboard [...]
Overview This past week I enjoyed looking at and interacting with Matt Chambers’ car color popularity bump chart. Figure 1 -- Matt Chambers' car color popularity bump chart. You can find the original Datagraver visualization upon which this was based here. The key to this dashboard is interactivity as it’s hard to parse all [...]
Some thoughts on functionality, beauty, crown molding, and lollipop charts Overview I’ve been writing a book about business dashboards with Jeffrey Shaffer and Andy Cotgreave and we’ve conducted screen-sharing sessions with dozens of people and reviewed scores of dashboards. We had a particularly enjoyable jam session with Tableau Zen Master Mark Jackson last week. When [...]
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 [...]
