The Power of Visualization | Tableau Full Course | Analytics Vidhya

Key Takeaways

foreign models with that code can be even more intriguing but that's not everybody's cup of tea and things really start getting tricky when it comes to designing a story and presenting a work to our audience who more often than not you'll find are non-technical people and this is where visualizations come in they are one of the best ways of telling a story with data an effective visualization Bridges the gap between what a data science professional creates on his or her own machine and the final outcome which a client or our stakeholder wants to see let's begin with an exercise it's one of my favorite things to get the Mind jogging before I dive into the nitty-gritty of why we're here have you seen Rubik's Cube before it's a puzzle in the form of a plastic Cube covered with multi-colored squares the aim is to twist and turn those squares so that all the squares on each face are of the same color but that's not our aim right now my question to you is and take a moment to think about it how many squares are there in a Rubik's Cube can you guess that in less than 10 seconds a Rubik's Cube has six sides with a total of 54 squares if you figure that out inside 10 seconds without Googling it well done most of us myself included struggle to do that it's just the way our brains are wired extensive Studies have shown how humans struggle with visualizing certain patterns Trends and even scenarios where angles and shapes are involved and speaking of our brain we can broadly divide that into two hemispheres the left side of our brain and of course the right side these two hemispheres control the motion and receive sensory inputs from the opposite side of our body but what does all of this have to do with visualizations well let's see the left hemisphere of our brain is responsible for tasks like reading writing speaking logical reasoning understanding and so on this hemisphere processes information sequentially one at a time the right hemisphere on the other hand handles visual perception all the patterns we see around us intuitively without realizing such as the shape of the chair you're sitting in the color of the walls around you right now or the various charts that we see in our weekly report all that happens thanks the right hemisphere of our brain I'm mentioning this to show you how an effective visualization or even a chart is processed by your audience their visual perception alters when we give them the right impactful visual cues broadly speaking visualization when you think about it falls under the umbrella of communication it's a technique that effectively lets us communicate our ideas to the person in front of us right that's the whole essence of it instead of words be using visual aids so let's take a moment to understand the power of visualization to the communication lens have you heard the three V's of communication they are verbal vocal and visual verbal is the words we speak vocal is the way we speak them essentially the tone of our Y is the inflection modulation and so on and visual is a combination of what we present how we use visual aids how well we understand our audience to present the right visual elements and of course our body language we'll focus on the first three aspects in this course now I want you to take a second to rank these three elements of communication in order of the impact pause the video for a second and list down your rankings which do you think ranks first which has the most impact got it verbal the words we use has the least impact and ironically most people focus their presentation or their preparation for communication on the verbal part vocal the way we say those words comes in second and visual basically how we present a thought and ideas has the biggest impact on our audience just a note of caution this is not set in stone this can vary depending on circumstances but it has held true for the most part over decades so keep this in mind simply put visualization is a powerful way of communicating our thoughts to our audience here's an animated visualization I really really like what do you think this represents the awesome folks over the Washington Post created an interactive visualization of the globe where they show the path of the solar eclipse as well as all future Eclipse Parts until 2018. this shows the parts of the eclipse the cities which will be affected and when basically the time is denoted by light and dark Shades I've mentioned the link to the article there at the bottom of the slide if you're interested in reading the entire post quite fascinating when you think about it the concept of visualization has actually been around for centuries from the early human age when humans used to draw symbols in caves and stones to communicate with their fellow beings to the Renaissance age when the Great Leonardo da Vinci one of my favorite characters in history used to keep notebooks on himself where he noted his ideas from machines using visualizations I'm sure you already thinking of other examples like these from the ages gone by and now we're at this stage in the 21st century thanks to advancements in technology and computation power that we can generate visualizations at incredibly granular levels such as our own cells this incidentally is one of my favorite visualizations such a beautiful contrast in colors and Contours don't you love how powerful and effective a visualization can be if used properly I'm sure you've seen the IBM report where they mentioned that 90 of the data present in the world today was generated in the last two years and guess what that report came four years ago can you even begin to imagine the amount of data we're producing right now honestly we're generating data at an unprecedented Pace this is down to a number of reasons including Rapid advancements in technology and consequently decreasing computation costs but we need effective tools to make sense of the data we're collecting right visualization is one such tool and we'll see that idea throughout this course and I'm sure a lot of you especially those who are interested in data science Must Be Wondering Where exactly this visualization fit in can we only use it during the exploratory stage well that's one part of it there's a lot more you can do with data visualization in the data science life cycle and that's why I wanted to include this slide and this graph to show you a different aspect of where visualization is effective in a data science project this is a classic example of visualizing a Time series data the blue line that we're seeing here represents historical data and the orange line can you guess what that is well that's the fun part the orange line is what the model is forecasting based on historical data this is a Time series model visualized in a simple effective and easy to understand manner do you love it so let's put a formal definition to data visualization what is it data visualization to put it succinctly is the ability to turn data into visible and tangible insights that people can intuitively understand this is my definition I'm sure you have your own when you think about this topic so as an exercise after this video I want you to pan down your definition of data visualization what you understand by it and we'll discuss that so now that we understand what it is let's spend a few minutes understanding the why why should we even use data visualization in the first place broadly speaking there are three primary goals I feel where data visualization helps us especially in today's data driven world first it helps us to explore our data this is where your exploratory data analysis comes in when we are given data and spend time exploring it trying to find hidden patterns and Trends they're not quite visible when we saw it in a tabular format we can also explore various hypotheses at this stage the second reason we use data visualization is to analyze our data once we know what data helps us find the answers we can dig deeper to identify specific items that reveal the answers and find ways to show those answers to our clients and our stakeholders the time series example we saw just a bit earlier fits into this stage in fact if you've used Google analytics or similar tools you can also think of those different traffic analyzing features here and the third reason is of course to present analysis this is where the communication aspect we covered earlier comes in we combine a visualization with storytelling and dashboarding to present a final work to our audience we'll discuss both storytelling and dashboarding aspects in much more detail later in this course so to truly build and master data visualization we need to be convinced why we are doing it in the first place and trust me that opens doors and opportunities you hadn't dreamed of before a well thought out visualization peels back the layers surrounding a raw data set are there any other broad reasons you feel we should use data visualization I would love to hear your thoughts in a discussion forum four key elements that go into designing any effective and impactful data visualization and as we look at each element in a bit more detail after this slide I want you to visualize Hans rostling's video or you can even think of your favorite visualization then try to map each element to that and you'll understand why these are key ingredients in cooking up an effective visualization the first element and you might have guessed this already is of course data the second element is that of Design This is one we can intuitively connect to when we speak of visualizations the third brings it all together in the form of a story and the final piece that completes a key element circle is business intuition how many of these did you think of before we listed them now let's understand all of these in a bit more detail it's a simple question what can we do without data we can't prove or disprove any hypothesis and we certainly can't analyze anything so this element involves collecting and storing data ensuring that the data is clean and ready for exploration analysis among other things again recall Hans rostling's video he and his team needed to First ensure that they had the correct Data before they could consider anything else then they considered the element of design how do we design an effective chart what components go into that how do we remove visual clutter and ensure the chart doesn't hold any extra information then what we want the audience to see or even something as basic as which chart do we choose for our data all of this falls under the design umbrella then comes the storytelling part one of my personal favorites this is when we bring everything together our understanding analysis takeaways to create the final presentation will be showing to audience this element involves is breaking down technical terms into non-technical easy to understand language something you'll need to do a lot in the data science world and finally we need business intuition this is the least spoken about element and I've seen experts just glossing over this when they are mentoring people it's not how it works if you don't have domain knowledge if we can't figure out how a certain variable fits into the business model how will we ever design an effective visualization consider your own domain for instance if you didn't know the basics of how your business or how the industry Works would you be able to gather the right data we can design the right charts and put together a story around it it's not possible so these are primarily the four key elements that combine to make a visualization effective impactful and memorable you can take a screenshot of this or print it out to keep it handy the next time you're working on a report or a presentation it's certainly helped me out a lot when I'm starting on sketching a rough idea of what I want to showcase are all of these four elements in my presentation that's a good question [Music]