July 2009 – Freakalytics

The seven habits of analyst rock stars!

2013Jun082009Jul21 by

Implement and practice these seven habits to make your work relevant, timely and actionable for the business and your customers! Collect, discuss and understand the questions that matter for your customers and business owners. Working with the business, determine how valuable the various questions are and whether they can be acted upon. How … Read more

Rapid Graphs- Tableau for Customer Segmentation and Lifetime Value Analysis

2016May192009Jul18 by

This was presented at the Tableau Conference 2009. It is about the tremendous opportunities to leverage customer segmentation and lifetime value data at the individual customer level. Click here for the presentation. Identifying segments for every customer can unlock long-hidden value for your marketing team. Combining this information with Tableau creates a simple means for … Read more

How the average American spends their income

2016May192009Jul14 by

It is frustrating to see valuable information hidden in well-meaning, but uninformative charts. FlowingData.com referenced just such an article, “How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck“.

The chart in the original article at Visual Economics is indeed attractive. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to understand. Key data relationships that should jump off of the chart are obscured by the donut chart and excessive chart text or “chart junk”.

Here are several accessible and simple ways to present this fascinating data. All of these examples were created with Tableau.

How the average American spends their income

tableau public available from the iPhone, with interactivity — amazing!

2016May192009Jul06 by

Here is a screenshot from my iPhone of my recently posted S&P composite dashboard with tableau public!
tableau public from iPhone

It’s truly amazing that the new tableau public product works wonderfully with every major desktop web browser. However, I was surprised to view tableau public from an iPhone. Even more surprising, I could use much of the interactivity without a mouse or keyboard! Kudos to the Tableau Software engineering team.

This feat is even more impressive when you consider that many popular web charting apps, like Google Finance are static on the iPhone. Google Analytics displays empty boxes in place of your expected graphs.

Stephen Few’s latest book, “Now you see it”

2013Jun172009Jul02 by

Stephen’s latest book is a brilliant interplay of simple to advanced statistical concepts with powerful visual equivalents and methods. It offers wonderful guidance with great examples around visualizing time series, correlations and multivariate analysis problems. It will have a major impact for many years to come in changing how business analysts work, think and improve … Read more