Visual Analytics–Best Practices – Page 6

Economic Indicators and S&P Composite Returns
from 1901-2008
A Dashboard to Explore Past, Present and Future Results

When creating a dashboard, two critical questions to ask include, “what are the right metrics” and “what collection of graphs will optimize exploration and understanding from a complex relationship between multiple metrics”? This example uses historic economic and stock market data to explore these concepts and to provide powerful insights into stock market patterns relative to economic conditions. This interactive dashboard is powered by tableau public, a new service of Tableau Software. One means of interacting with this dashboard is data point brushing, highlight data in a part of the dashboard by single-clicking and dragging

Why don’t you just show me the numbers?

Poor presentation of data can make informative interpretation difficult or even impossible.
We spend years diagramming sentences & solving equations but have minimal exposure to telling stories with data!
The ability to explore, understand and utilize real-world data is a rare skill that can dramatically improve your organization and career.

Sample revenue data from a university

College	Quarter	Total Revenue	Tuition	Research	Plan Revenue
Arts	2009-01	$5,510,268	$5,230,198	$280,070	$6,000,000
Design	2009-01	$703,770	$408,762	$295,008	$680,000
Engineering	2009-01	$25,139,083	$6,201,932	$18,937,151	$26,800,000
Sciences	2009-01	$4,439,991	$2,159,010	$2,280,981	$4,400,000

A prickly example

While it is indeed looking sharp, this graph is uninformative.

S&P Composite Stock Market Returns Dashboard

Visual Analytics Best Practices—avoid flash, keep it simple!