Data Visualization Golden Rules

Last week I posted about a friend of mine, John Brookmyre, who blogged about getting started with cloud computing. It's a great post and John's blog is something that's definately worth keeping an eye on, because he understands and can communicate business intelligence very well in addition to being able to deliver technically in some 20+ platforms.



John's latest post, is about business intelligence data visualization, something that I've been very interested in for the 2 years, and have written about my experiences in the following;

• User Centred Design and Business Intelligence
• Business Intelligence Dashboards

Interestingly, Johns post has been commented on by Tableau Software, who are niche players in the BI market, but among the industry leaders in BI data visualisation. You can trial the software, which I did about 9 months ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Performance Point Server.



On that occasion the client purchased PPS instead, which we deployed via a customised sharepoint front end. We got round the limitations of both PPS and sharepoint with some clever visualisation tricks and the result was stunning. I'd been reading Stephen Few's blog for a while, (he's a modern day Edward Tufte) and also had some recent experience of heuristic evaluation, which meant I was well up to speed on usability and visualization. If your interested in getting into the subject then these are good places to start.



Back to Tableau though. It's a very interesting product and I wasn't able to get through it all in the 28 days. I managed some very pleasing visualisations involving multiple graphs in a grid formation. The advantages of this being you waste very little space on title's and legends as you benefit from a write once, use many policy. I managed to get 25 graphs on screen (5x5) in a layout that wasn't off-putting, and I could see it working for business users. I've pasted in below an example of the tableau website, that demonstrates the type of visualisation I'm describing. (I like to think that mine was better though!)