Many of the mobile applications that I use have accordion-style navigation to allow me to quickly pop up additional details if I want to investigate something further, like stock activity if I see a price suddenly jump or fall. I wanted to add this interactivity to my Tableau mobile dashboards, and now with parameter actions, we can.

We are back from an exciting and information-packed Tableau conference. In case you were not able to attend the sessions, we have handy links below so you can view the sessions at your convenience.

There are a lot of helpful hints on modifying desktop dashboards into mobile ones. They tend to focus on altering the layout to be tall and being mindful of finger-based interactions. I feel they forget one critical aspect - users don’t actually want to look at dashboards on a mobile device. Now with that blasphemous statement out of the way, let’s get on to what users on mobile do want, an analytics app that serves up relevant content that is engaging, useful, and quick to digest on the go.

I seem to be in a mood about making the traditional KPI dashboard a bit more modern as well as increase the value to the end user by aiding the understanding of what is critical. If you haven’t already checked out the post on lighting, please do. It focused on lighting effects to draw the users eye to what is critical based on the impact of a KPI’s deviation from a target. In this post, we play with a KPI’s position on a “mobile app” as another method to assist the user in focusing on what is important now!

If we consider ourselves storytellers of data, then we should always strive to make those stories more engaging. Taking a cue from movies, photography, and stage, lighting can draw attention to the most critical components of a story. Directing focus is often relegated to minor visual cues such as a dot at the end of a sparkline, or an up and down arrow colored by good vs bad.  Instead of being adornment that distracts from the story, this use of “white space”, focuses attention. We hope this lighting technique adds an enhanced user experience by conveying the drama of a KPI’s deviation from the target’s impact on your organization.

Over the last couple of months, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with the 4th and 5th Grade Girls Club at a San Francisco school and get them excited about all things data visualization and mapping. In a couple lunches and after school workshops we learned about cartography, map construction, and design, built our own outrageously fun custom maps of San Francisco using Mapbox, and finally contributed to the #VisualizeNoMalaria project by tracing buildings for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap.  My presentation for all the lessons, as well as the instructions for the building tracing are below.   My hope is to help data viz and map practitioners to get involved with children in their local schools to inspire the #DataKids of tomorrow.  Get Mapping!

I think of this viz as a dystopian Harold and the Purple Crayon.  Harold had the power to create a world by simply drawing it.  In this viz, my consumptive malaise draws the world around me.  By sifting through the pile, I discover meaning and conflict in the mountain of banal objects that I interact with daily, and ponder why I use so many things.

The idea was simple - to log every “thing” that I used throughout the course of the day and visualize the “pile”.  Then, categorize and group all the things and see what story they tell.

"War Transposed" takes the coordinates of bombs dropped by the U.S. during the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973 and moves them to the U.S.

This is not a statement on the right or wrong of the war, but rather an effort to create context and empathy for the destruction that happens duiring conflict.

This is an artistic piece. The data caveats are many.

While starting to work on a new viz project, I came up with the idea to create empathy by putting the user inside of a 3D map with the data happening around them like a virtual reality movie.  Yes, the DataBlick crazy-town express train is starting to chug out of the station again.  This post shows some of my initial explorations into jumping in a viz.

This is a post by Max, Anya's 12-year-old son.  It was his Science / Engineering Fair project where he used Tableau to visualize his results.  Thank you, Adam McCann and Merlijn Buit for your posts on color analysis that were used by Max for this project.

Each year many people die of bombs and other explosive devices. Some examples are the Boston Marathon and the recent bombing in Manhattan. In many modern wars, thousands of soldiers die due to IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). In my project, I will use an infrared sensor to find a cell phone (in place of an IED) in different temperature environments. Judging by how easy it is to see the cell phone, we can tell where infrared would work best, as well as where it would not work.  Using this information we can know when to use infrared sensors to save lives.

Recently DataBlick had a client project dealing with analyzing parts on a car during manufacturing and transport, and the client wanted something like Noah's Tesla.  We all want a Tesla, right?  Well, now you can have one (in Tableau at least).  In this post, I'll walk you through how to find a 3D model and get it into Tableau.  The next post will show how to trick it out a little bit as well as "explode" parts in a 3D tool before bringing them into Tableau so you can highlight and interact with them on your dashboard.