Tapestry Conference: the blog post

To me, the best learning experiences are ones where I walk out with more questions than I had when I went in

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On the things you can and can’t do in Tableau

I hate conclusions. I can vividly remember how much I always struggled with them in high school English class. And they have never stopped bothering me. This year’s Tableau conference was a special experience for me. I had been to a couple before, but this year was my return after a one year (involuntary) hiatus. …

Visual metaphors for data communication: what’s in it for me?

Finding meaningful visual metaphors for your data and audience is much more than just choosing how to present your data. It’s about the best way to visually explain your data in a way that will help your audience find meaning and connection.

Case study part 1: Identifying use cases

In this first part of our case study, we'll look at using your expert tools - the histogram and boxplot - plus some more complex variations of these charts, to identify good use cases for demonstrating the added value of going beyond averages.

A workflow for optimizing histograms

Histograms are one of the most powerful tools for understanding a set of numbers (aka a data distribution). But it’s also open to lots of misinterpretation. That’s why it’s so important to spend some time optimizing this type of chart. But optimizing histograms is one of those areas that’s part art and part science. Here’s …

A methodology for increasing data literacy maturity

Part 2 of the series includes a high level view of my recommended steps for increasing data literacy, and a workflow for data exploration to identify good use cases.

Data Literacy & User Adoption

This is part of a 5 part series, wherein I will explain my take on data literacy. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, so my take is necessarily quite lengthy. This series will include some philosophy, some overview of existing research and scholarship, some strategy recommendations, and of course …

Chart deconstruction: Mountain Range Histogram

One of my favorite things, especially for my personal work on Tableau public, is to come up with unique ways to use out-of-the-box features. I think the best way to describe it is ‘visual hacks’. No crazy geometry involved. Only factory parts. This post is part design process and part how to, for a recent …

UX for dataviz design: Evaluating user information experience

In celebration of 2017 closing, instead of looking back, I wanted to celebrate by looking forward and kicking off a new blog series. As some of you know, my roots are in UX design. For almost as long as I’ve been doing data viz, I’ve wanted to see UX approaches being utilized more in the …

The Tableau action you probably never use and totally should

Spoiler alert: it’s worksheet actions! Did you know that you can use actions outside of the dashboard, to “drill down” between 2 worksheets? I only discovered this a few months ago, but it has been a complete game changer for me. An example Just for fun, I am using a small “presidential” tweets data set, …