Dustin Smith, Community Manager, Tableau Software, presents at the 2012 Big Analytics Roadshow. Organizations now have the ability to store and process massive amounts of data like never before. And there are huge expectations for turning data into a fundamental driver for business transformation and competitive advantage. Visual analytics is helping everyday employees gain insight into data in order to solve unexpected problems and challenges, it is changing the way people interact with data and the way business intelligence is defined in organizations. In this presentation, we will share real-world examples of how everyday people can and are using visual analytics to solve some of businesses most challenging issues.

1. Practical Applications of
Visual Analytics
Dustin Smith
Tableau Software

2. We have been using tabular
representations of data for 4,000 years

3. We’re still using tabular
representations of data today

4. Improved representation can transform reflecting
on data to experiencing it
“The deep fundamental question in statistical analysis is Compared with what?”, Edward Tufte

5. The Key to Making Sense of Data is Visualization

6. Exploit the power of the
human visual system

7. Leverage the Human Perceptual System
70% 30%
Total Sense Receptors

10. Iterate, explore, and
experiment

11. How do people reason about data?
Through an unpredictable and iterative process.
• Discovering structure;
• Finding patterns and outliers;
• Deriving causal relationships;
• etc.
Cycle of Visual Analysis

12. Incremental
Allow people to easily
and incrementally
change the data they
are looking at and how
they are looking at it.
Find the perfect view: People can intuitively explore a broad space of
visualizations to find the “perfect” views that answer their questions.
Build visual literacy at their own pace: Start simple…and then slowly, over time,
build up sophisticated views of their data
Perform rapid Q&A: Quickly layer new information into a view to answer new
questions

13. Expressive
No single view answers every question.

14. Unified
As people engage in Q&A with their data, they need to be able to
change both:
• The data they are looking at, and
• How they are looking at that data.
Query many times and then generate a summary graph.
Traditional Reporting Tools versus
Iteratively change the data and image to find the perfect view.
Visual Analysis Systems
Query once and then iterate on the presentation of the data.
Traditional Visualization Tools

15. The Cycle of Visual Analysis Leads to Monitoring,
Sharing and Storytelling

16. Generate Effective Presentations of Data
• Provide the flexibility to generate a wide range of images without
encouraging poor design;
• Generate effective presentations of data by default.
What is effective? Supporting Effective Presentation
Communicates all of the data Limiting the visual properties to a simple
Communicates only the data and proven set
Leverages the human perceptual system Great defaults
Is understandable Automatic marks
Is interpretable Layout
Small multiples
Support for titling, captioning, &
annotation

17. Big Data
“The Library of Congress has
18 terabytes of data. We do
that every three days.”
David Stone
Senior Manager – Analytics Platform
eBay
“More data beats better
algorithms”
Anand Rajaraman
Teaches Web Scale Data Mining
at Stanford University
1,048,576
Max rows in Excel 2010
Is that Big Data?

18. Help people
see and understand
their data

23. Tableau Software, Inc.
Customers Include:
• Fastest growing business intelligence company • Apple
in the world • Microsoft
• Wells Fargo
• Stanford Professor Pat Hanrahan and Dr. Chris Stolte
• Bank of America
invented the visualization technology
• Walmart
• eBay
• Founded in 2003 – currently on Version 7 of the software
• Linked In
• Headquartered in Seattle, WA • Zynga
• Electronic Arts
• 400 employees • GM
• Dozens of Universities
• A number of Intelligence
Agencies
+ 1000’s more