The Value of Data Visualization
According to Pat Hanrahan Chief Scientist & co-founder of Tableau Software, the value of data visualisation is to improve decision making, to become more dynamic in your business, and to facilitate coordination within the organisation. The opportunity and challenge is there is no single best visualisation and designing can be both difficult and rewarding, but think of visualisations as a symbolic form that enables problem solving. Taking a visualisation one step further is to enable collaboration, for others to learn from you and make decisions. As a result, people and groups are far more productive.
Pictures speak a 1000 words
Visualisations are mathematical, symbolic and manipulable. They become more powerful at that point, since we can use them instead of just look at them. He calls this writing, when you can write in the visualisation and not just read it. Pat helped invent the term visual analytics which means analytical processing and human reasoning facilitated by the interactive visualisation. Essentially coupling the computing power of algorithms that are highly interactive and visual, with people.
How has that been put into play within Tableau? VizSQL is the language. No wizards. Flexibility. And, the user can make formulas (or questions) for Tableau to create their own visualisation.
Take a table of information with headers. The headers are intelligent to create a view for the eyes to scan only what it wants to see, but when it comes down to scanning the rows for say a maximum value the brain is maxed at a couple pieces of information. Moving that same information into the bar chart the visualisation is able to call attention that maximum value and allow the brain to focus on the data that is important. This is the principle behind the use of visualisations in Tableau.
3 Important Tips
I will leave you with Pat's three important things about a visualisation:
- Reduce search time,
- Reduce memory load,
- Allow perceptual interference.
These are just a few things, but they are biggest things to think about.