At work, I’ve been brainstorming some data visualization techniques to help live video producers understand their audiences. Fortunately, my company understands the importance of having a Wow Factor. The challenge is to come up with “eye candy” that is both aesthetic and useful.
Some of the most fun data visualization applications are abstract. More art than anything else. This won’t suffice for an analytics dashboard. Customers need to get in and make sense of what’s going on right away.
There are common, traditional techniques that generally do a good job of this, but there is definitely room for improvement — out of the box thinking. The graph and chart “usual suspects” are best suited for structured, statistical data. For understanding trends and relationships, they are usually pretty weak.
For trends and multi-dimensional relationships over large sets of data, one must employ techniques that take advantage of the human mind’s ability to understand shapes, colors, and patterns.
A heat map is an excellent example of a visualization technique that can quickly go from informative but dull to beautiful but data-less.
The goal is not only to overwhelm the user with beauty, but also overwhelm them with knowledge and understanding of the data set they’re viewing.