Sharon has an Masters of Science in Mathematics and a Masters in Education
When many people look at data, they perceive just a sea of meaningless numbers. Data visualization is a trend that seeks to combat the natural reaction many people have to raw numbers. Take Gunnar, for example. He is dejected and perplexed. He has just come out of a corporate meeting where he had been trying to communicate what he thought was an important trend in the sales data to the company leaders. However, they had asked very few questions, and clearly didn't understand what he was trying to communicate. He isn't sure what went wrong.
Later that day, Gunnar talks to a colleague, David, about his experience. David is not surprised by the poor reception at the meeting. He explains that most people are not mathematically oriented like Gunnar and can't see trends in raw data. To get most people to understand what the data tells Gunnar, he will have to change the form of the data by making it more visual. Data visualization is a growing field in the business world that takes raw data and organizes it to tell a visual story. David explains there are many ways to do this, from simple tables to very expensive computer software services.
Gunnar had originally shown his superiors this chart:
| 'City' | '2014 Sales' | '$ Growth' |
|---|---|---|
| NY | $1,976,252 | $188,163 |
| Chicago | $1,652,384 | $42,613 |
| LA | $1,256,849 | $45,570 |
| Charlottesville, VA | $357,961 | $40,075 |
| Madison, WI | $269,875 | $50,128 |
| Missoula, MT | $202,525 | $44,772 |
| Iowa City, IA | $123,456 | $25,518 |
How does the chart work?
Gunnar is showing them that, although the large cities have shown the largest growth in terms of sales dollars, the largest growth percentages have been in smaller cities. Also, the largest potential for sustained growth is in the smaller cities as well - because there is much less competition for their products.
David suggests making some changes to improve the table:
The reworked chart now becomes:
| 'City' | '% Growth 2014' | 'Competitors' |
|---|---|---|
| Missoula, MT | 22% | 0 |
| Iowa City, IA | 21% | 1 |
| NY | 10% | 5 |
| LA | 4% | 4 |
| Chicago | 3% | 5 |
Gunnar is surprised, thinking this new chart doesn't really show any new information the old one didn't. David explains that although the chart may look the same to him, most people looking at the two charts see something completely different. The second chart drives home Gunnar's point, while the first one buries it in a sea of numbers.
As you can see with Gunnar's example, data visualization can start on a very small scale.
Other examples would be graphing trend lines for measurements that tend to be very erratic:
 |
In the above picture, even though it is in another language, it's very easy to tell that there is a cyclical increase and decline (blue dots), but overall the moving average is increasing (pink dots).
With the amount of data being collected by many companies these days, much more sophisticated visualizations are possible. For example, millions of data points related to street lights all over the world could be put together to form an incredibly accurate map of industrialization hot-spots - and this could be done in real-time! There are also data visualization programs out there that will help you create your own measurements or send you a text message if a certain measurement exceeds a specified level. Others allow real time access to data visualizations through a smartphone and enable you to start email conversations about a specific data visualization with a pre-determined set of users at the touch of a button. Companies pay tens of thousands of dollars a month to have this capability - because they know being able to see trends in data is crucial for business success in this day and age.
As you can see, there are virtually unlimited ways to use data visualization to tell stories with numbers. These range from very simple tables and graphs to sophisticated real-time pictures that can show you just about anything you can dream up (as long as there is data to go with that dream). Data visualization is just a fancy way of telling a visual story with numbers. A sudden spike on a graph, an over-sized dot on a sales map, or a large number in a table are all examples of data visualization using data to appeal to humans' dominant sense: vision.
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