Dad. Husband. Innovator.
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I cringe when I see beautiful maps, charts and graphs that provide no value. For a truly valuable visualization, you need to make sure you account for the aspects that not only make it beautiful, but more importantly usable for making good business decisions. Like so many others, i started out only building what looked […]
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In the SaaS world, analytics powers existing development and should determine the next steps in the path for the future of products and services. So if I asked the question, how do you define analytics? User details and behavior? Application performance? Reporting? The answer shouldn’t be complicated. When I think of answering that question, I […]
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When it comes to user experience, a product manager should always understand who the stakeholders are for their product. It is very common to do stakeholder interviews and get detailed business cases from them. Those are absolutely important, but an interesting way to visualize that information is through circular stakeholder maps. I’m not seeing these […]
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A great dashboard creates more questions than it answers. It pushes business decisions into new directions and helps to validate previous work. So, what makes a good user experience when building analytic dashboards? There are a number of ways you can ensure that your users are taken care of and get what they need. The […]
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I get many questions about how and when to use certain types of visualizations. Scatterplots are a unique and powerful tool to visualize data and when used correctly, can identify patterns and find trends in even the most complex sets of data. When data points have a relationship to one another, it is called a […]
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What makes for a good visualization? There are a number of components that are necessary for a visualization to be valuable. Just having a line (series item) represent some segment of data (y-axis) over time (x-axis) isn’t enough. For a data visualization to be relevant you need two main things, context and reference. The more […]
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Semantic. What does that mean? With regards to technology, when something is semantic it describes or identifies itself. When you are talking code, a tag may describe itself, such as a < header > tag in HTML. It describes what its purpose or reason is. That can also apply for visualizations. An important, yet often […]
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Dashboard development has become novel in the last 5 years. Everyone has a dashboard that is branded “easy”, “intuitive” or “custom”. I have interactions with clients and the number one question I get is “What will this do for ME?” It got me thinking. In today’s data-centric society, we tend to focus our efforts around […]
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If you build data visualizations you have run into the issues of useless words destroying the value of your display. You should find a way to implement these “stopwords” into your data streams. Here is a collection of stopword lists in many languages. http://www.ranks.nl/stopwords
jsteinmetz
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If you are working, in any capacity, chances are you see and use data visualizations everyday. There is so much data moving around, you have to find a way to make sense of it all. Very few users can make sense of raw data and even fewer can see patterns in that. Good visualization layers […]