Speaking of lessons learned...

I saw this blog post earlier today and absolutely loved it.  One reason is because I have heard this so many times before.  The other because he covers some of the design issues I struggle with when designing public data visuals.  I can also very much relate to those three stages he goes through upon hearing other people's reactions to his data visual.


Anyways...enough about me.  Check out Steve Wexler's Hey Your Tableau Public Viz is Ugly *and* Confusing.

  

Data Vader

I was excited and honored that I won Tableau's "Evil Viz" contest last week.  Thank you Tableau for the awesomely evil Funko Darth Vader (that you see in the picture at the left)!  After seeing some of the other entries, I wasn't very optimistic about my chances.  However, even though I was in it to win it, I also wanted to show that I could learn from my previous entry in the sports contest.  I wrote about 4 lessons that I learned from my hockey stats entry previously.  Let's see how I applied those lessons to my Evil Viz submission.  

Dr. Sinister's Data Visual of Doom

Like most evil mad scientists, Dr. Sinister has dreams of one day ruling the world.  But apparently, he has some personal scores to settle first.  Fortunately for us, I happened across his data visual that details his evil plans.  Hopefully we can warn his victims before it is too late!  (Well...maybe not all his victims.)

Tiger Salamanders in Battleboro, NC

Ever wondered how many salamanders you might find in Battleboro, NC? Thanks to the USA National Phenology Network, you can wonder no more. Here is the observation data for 2010. You can check out what the exact location looks like at Google maps.


Let me know what you think.

The Tableau Sports Data Viz Contest

The winner was announced this afternoon and the winner is not me.  You can check out the winning visualizations here.  Not an unexpected ending to this.  The whole experience however was pretty amazing and I learned a lot from entering the contest.

Which NHL players benefit from more shifts?: Official Entry for Tableau Sports Data Viz Contest (2 of 2)

Tableau allows us to enter up to two visualizations in their contest.  So after building the monster Explore NHL Player Stats I took some time to figure out what a more manageable data visualization would look like based off the results I was getting from exploring the player stats.

I have always been a fan of the plus/minus stat.  I always thought it was a good way to measure how well players play together on the ice.  A player's plus/minus increases by +1 when their team scores while that player is on the ice.  However, it also decreases -1 whenever the opponent scores while that player is on the ice.  I compare that against the average number of shifts a player has during a game and we can start to see which players benefit from having more shifts. 

It is another scatter plot, but with the filters, you can narrow your view and compare conferences and divisions and teams.  I also added a box based off of the min and max values for shifts and plus/minus.  This allows you to compare how groups of players (divisions, conferences, teams) compare against one another.  However, before you get that far, just take a look at the visualization as is.  Which conference's players seems to have a better plus/minus the more shifts they have?

Let me know what you think!

Explore NHL Player Stats from 2010-11 Season: Official Entry for Tableau Sports Data Viz Contest (1 of 2)

When I was younger, I loved choose your own adventure books.  However, I always got peeved when I wanted to choose an option that the book did not make available to me.  Or that several of the paths in the book seemed to have the same ending.  Well, now that I am older and am in control of the "story" I will let you choose which path to take in order to determine your own ending.  Choose your stats to mash-up. Choose how you want to view the players in the chart.  Highlight teams, players, or positions.  Or drill down to look at specific divisions or teams.

This visualization might seem intense, but if you take some time and choose your path wisely, you'll find that there are a wide variety of endings to choose from.  I had a lot of fun making it and even more fun playing with it.  Let me know what sorts of interesting tidbits you get as a result.