Archive for the ‘Presentation’ category

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Be a Data Rockstar

March 6th, 2009

Fed up with playing with sample data that involves reporting on sales by region or products by product type?  Well here’s a challenge for people who think they know a thing or two about data visualisation and it uses some real-world data, so you might even learn something along the way.

datarockstar

It couldn’t be simpler:

  • Download a bit of software
  • Pick and download a dataset to analyse
  • Get creative and analyse it
  • Save and submit your workbook
  • win a million dollars
  • (ok that last bit was a complete lie)

Lots more information about it here

Good luck and let me know how you go.  In fact send me your visualisations and I’ll post them on here

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Posted in Presentation, Visualisation

Seeing the Big Pineapple

March 5th, 2009

Since my last post about Tableau, I have been thinking much harder about the viability of putting a visualisation tool on top of a well architected and implemented dimensional warehouse.

I don’t think there is much dispute that in terms of exploring data through play, there are some pretty sophisticated visualisation tools out there and potentially these can help you find startlingly obvious things in your data that you simply hadn’t realised were there.

bigpineapple

The problem for me previously was that these tools were great at manipulating small volumes of pre-aggregaeted data in a spreadsheet or simple client database but throwing large volumes of highly granualar data around from an enterprise-scale data warehouse was a completely different ball game.

Some of these tools could  interrogate a proprietary OLAP cube and do so rapidly but but what is that if not a highly specialised set of pre-aggregated data?

An industrial-strength BI product such as Cognos that gives you ETL-to-Delivery in a single platform is certainly an attractive single-vendor solution and it comes with all manner of report scheduling and delivery capability - truly an end to end solution.

The downside of the sledgehammer is where it misses the specialisation that can only comes with the niche products.  There is no way you can get outputs from Cognos to look like those from Tableau but they aren’t meant to, they are entirely different products for entirely different purposes.

So are they complimentary?

Well yes, that would have been my initial suggestion.  Have a high-end visualiastion tool to do some really smart reporting on a set of aggregate tables or even Excel output from your main BI platform.  This is definitely a workable solution although the downside is that you move away from what was probably a hard-fought stance of having a single BI platform in your organisation.  I could probably live with that if the platform was administered and managed by the same people who administer and manage the main BI platform.  Also, this is an ever-changing world and we shouldn’t be constrained by yesterday.

But is there another option?

You know I think there is, or at least I think there will be very soon.  These niche products are evolving very rapidly but I don’t think we will end up with more of the same.  I believe we are rapidly approaching a point where you can have your warehouse and ETL entirely separate from your BI visualisation tools without compromising performance and all the other elements that have traditionally only been provided with a mainstream BI vendor - things like enterprise-level security, integrated scheduling, delivery and formatting options, browser-based interfaces, dashboards etc.

If extremely powerful end-user visualisation tools can effectively sit on top of an enterprise data warehouse in an organisation with large volumes of high quality dimensionally-modeled data then this is an exciting prospect indeed.

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Posted in Dimensional Models, Presentation, Visualisation

When Pies are unAustralian

February 25th, 2009

I sat through a really interesting and engaging presentation earlier this week but for some reason the overriding memory I have is that it had a lot of pie charts and they weren’t very easy to read. To his credit, the presenter acknowledged this but I was left wondering if he was aware of an alternative.

I’m not about to lambast pie charts or people who use them but I am going to say that since I started taking more of an interest in the topic of information presentation I no longer use them.

It is easy to forget that working with Business Intelligence tools all day long provides us with exposure to what is considered best practice for conveying information visually through charts. So this post is for anyone who might be unsure how to display information currently shown in a pie chart in some other manner.

Few-pie chart

So what is wrong with this pie chart?

I picked this one because of all the examples I found, it was the closest to the type I saw earlier this week. In his excellent article Save the Pies for Dessert, Stephen Few asserts that in the above pie chart example, we can only judge the 25% green slice easily, the magnitude of the remaining ones are difficult to discern and of course the very small slivers are even more difficult to identify and estimate. There is also the issue of associating the slices of colour with the legend on the right and having to hop back and forth between the two in order to interpret the information.

How else could I display this information?

If the same data is presented in a bar chart as Few points out, ‘the values can now be compared with relative ease and precision, relying solely on the graph’ . To me the result is cleaner, more visually pleasing and much easier to interpret.

few-bar-chart

I couldn’t finish without a word from the master himself…

‘A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them’ - Edward Tufte - The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001

and if you’re still reading, there are some great quotes in this blog entry by Coda Hale - what an awesome name that guy has ;)

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Posted in Presentation, Visualisation

e-Motional Outpourings

February 17th, 2009

It is an exciting time around campus at the moment, we’re in the middle of Orientation week and there is a real buzz about the place. There is also a buzz in our generic stats warehouse feed which records how students feel about their units of study. We introduced the capability in the middle of last year and it is still in beta mode but the results so far mean indicate it could be here to stay.

emoticon

e-Motion enables a student to click an emoticon against each of their enrolled units in the myUNE student portal. They can do this every month, week, day or multiple times a day if they like, there is no limit or recommended rate, it is entirely down to the individual. The significant part of the design is the ease with which e-Motions are recorded. It is literally a click-and-done action so we can get hundreds a day.

We then pull this data into the warehouse each night and look for patterns and trends. More importantly we look for indications that the student might be ‘at risk’ or in need of assistance or support.

The idea behind all of this is that if we do something that upsets people, we get to hear about it quickly and we can therefore put it right, quickly. Conversely if we do something good that pleases people then we can do more of that. In other words we learn and improve through direct feedback.

The take-up has been really good, it is probably the busiest week of the year so far and today we were recording e-Motion hits at the rate of one every 2.4 minutes. That is great feedback.

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Higher Education, Presentation

An Agile Manifestation

February 10th, 2009

I was looking at the Agile Manifesto again just now and thought how valid those choice words still were today. The original words were crafted out eight years ago tomorrow (11-13th February 2001) at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah. The history of how this came about is worth a read if you haven’t found it before.

wordle-agile-manifesto

So to celebrate this anniversary and just for something different I thought I’d try and emphasise these words using Wordle. Wordle was awarded an ‘Honorable Mention’ in Flowing Data’s 5 Best Data Visualisation Projects of the Year in 2008. The above image was created using http://www.wordle.net

If you have some content you want to present in an unusual but impactful way then try it out. You can see the above Wordle online or create your own by clicking on the wordle above.

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Posted in Agile, Design, Presentation

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