When Customers Delight Us

Posted by Elissa Fink on December 31, 2007

Filed under: case study visual example

I think many companies today work hard at trying to delight their customers. (I know Tableau certainly does and that's one of the things I love about working here.) But it's such a treat when a customer delights us - as our customer Piort Motyka of Kwantum did.

Piotr Motyka has been a Tableau user for about 16 months. In that time, he has built impressive visualizations for his automotive market research data.

In this most recent case, he took our data visualization software application normally used for data analysis and visual analytics and cleverly found a way to share his best wishes for a great 2008. And in doing so, he's probably challenged our development team to think about our application in new ways.

Certainly, we never set out to build a graphics design tool and I don't think Piotr would call himself a graphic designer. But he has encouraged us to see how something we've built can be used in different ways - ways we probably never intended!

In fact, a lot of our customers send us examples of their visual data analysis efforts. Usually we're not at liberty to share them due to client confidentiality. (For examples we can release, see our Visual Examples pages.) Whether we can share them or not, we love seeing how customers are using our products - it makes building better products that much easier. So if you're a Tableau user, we welcome your examples and stories. Send them to your account manager or to me - we'll make sure our development team sees the creative stuff you're doing.

So thank you Piotr for delighting us - and happy new year to you and all our Tableau customers. What a great way to start the new year.

1) People need databases and analytical tools that operate at the speed of thought. Jock points out that people can only think effectively when the data matches the agility of their thoughts. I am a marketing analyst at heart and all I really care about is getting access to and using my data as fast as possible. I know my data can answer my marketing questions and I don't want to ask someone else to report on it, summarize it, or spend weeks deploying yet another middleware format with its own quirks.

2) People need easier ways to work their data. A former colleague would tell his team who would bring complex reports or reams of data, "don't make me think." I always liked that message - he was saying keep it simple and clear. But what he really meant was "don't make it hard for me to think." We all need more thinking time and less time wasted on writing specs (much less queries), translating tables or reformatting reports. Jock points out that well-designed graphical presentations of data exploit the power of the human visual system and make it easier to see and understand data.

3) Big databases (usually with many terabytes and sometimes called data warehouse appliances) are not just for specialists - ordinary business users (like me) don't want fewer data - we want more. And guess what? We want fast, direct access. The bottleneck will be figuring out how to empower ordinary people to use their data to think better and thus make life better.

Anyway, check out Jock's Letter. It's instructive and thought-provoking in many ways.

In his blog, he wrote "while the statement 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' serves as a great warning whenever we contemplate something new, it should not mean that we ignore the options. A good case in point is the way we currently analyze and visualize discovery and development data. The tried and true tools include SAS, S-PLUS, Spotfire and Integrated Review. But now there is another tool that's worth a look, Tableau."

We always are grateful when people see that what Tableau is doing is different and innovative. And in fact, George saw that we have plenty of Biopharma clients (including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Roche Diagnostics, Merck, etc.) so we're really not a stretch for this industry.

We see the future of BI using imagination and creativity. In fact, adjectives like “simple,” easy,” and “beautiful” are core tenets at Tableau. Thankfully, our customers have responded very positively to this.

Tableau Software is attracting a new generation of data workers who simply expect more from BI applications. We understand this and it informs everything we do. Thanks to CRN for the recognition.

For most users, Tableau Software just does the right thing. However, automatically choosing defaults for visualizations is a challenging problem that has been researched for many years. Fortunately for Tableau, one of our first employees was Jock Mackinlay, whose thesis in the 1986 pioneered automated graphic design. We use many ideas from Jock's early work, but have enhanced them with many subtle and important innovations. If you want to learn more about how things work under the hood, read our paper. Expect more technology in this area from Tableau in the future.

ShowMe is an example of what makes Tableau different than other visualization products. Most analysts are not expert graphic designers, and shouldn't need to become one to use visual analysis tools. If people spend all their time in awkward dialog boxes and multi-step wizards in order to make things look right, the less time they have to think about the problem they are trying to solve.

Our presentation fit well into the broader theme of the conference - Visualization for the Masses. Unfortunately, visual analysis tools are still underutilized. There is tremendous opportunity to improve the way ordinary people access and understand their data. There are several big trends that I see. First, tools are being designed to better support the work that business users perform daily. Second, many displays look cute, but are puzzling to most people.

Tools such as Tableau strive to present the data clearly, and not use gratuitous graphics or wacky visual metaphors. Of course, the visualizations should be fun, engaging, and memorable; they should show information in evocative ways that encourage creative problem solving.

Finally, an emerging trend is collaborative analysis. In almost every business, groups of people work together to solve problems. The collective intelligence of an organization is much greater than the sum of its parts. Tableau Server is our first product targeted at groups working together. We are very excited by the possibilities in this area and are hard at work enhancing this product line.

Comparing Standardized Math Tests: Check Out Your WA School District

Posted by Jock Mackinlay on December 12, 2007

Filed under: education visual example

I was quoted today in a Bruce Ramsey editorial at the Seattle Times about needing quality math instruction to help our children be competitive in the global economy. Much to my surprise, Bruce included the fact that I work at Tableau Software. He probably saw the tie to the global economy. Like all successful startups, Tableau Software is hiring. We also compete globally so we definitely want our job applicants to have a solid background in mathematics. However, my quote was as a private person.

Nevertheless, my interest in Washington State math instruction has been useful to my work at Tableau. As the Director of Visual Analysis, I need to use our products authentically to see and understand data so that I can know how to improve the user experience for our customers. Since I have an authentic interest in the math testing data about Washington State, I explore it as a way to identify where our product is easy and hard to use. The rest of this posting describes how I did this and what I learned about Tableau and the test data. At the end, I include a link to the workbook, which you can view in our free Tableau Reader if you are interested in looking at the data for school districts in Washington.

DATA:

The first step was to access the test data. Since I was interested in the WASL test (Washington Assessment of Student Learning), Google quickly lead me to the website hosted by the Offices of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to report WASL data:

http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?year=2006-07

I found it pretty easy to use this web interface to see data about the state or individual school districts but I found it inadequate for answering comparative questions such as the relative trends of two school district. What I needed were views of data that were designed to support comparison so I turned to Tableau Desktop, which is a great tool for designing interactive graphical views of data. To use Tableau Desktop, I needed the underlying data rather than the summary data that was reported in the web interface. Turned out the OSPI provides this data as a bunch of Excel files on the following page:

This was great except that each file had a unique set of columns and different years used different names for the school districts. I quickly found this out when I loaded the files into Tableau and spent a couple of evenings cleaning up the files and joining the resulting data with an address file that OSPI also provided. The result is quite useful but much more work than access to a database hosted by OSPI.

VISUAL ANALYSIS:

Since I was interested in comparative questions, I got very excited when I saw that the download page included the test results of the ITBS, which is a nationally-normed test produced by the University of Iowa. It turns out that the WASL and the ITBS were given to most of the students in the state from 2000 to 2005, which means I could create a view that validly compared the two tests. However, I was interested in the data at both the state level and district level. Although Tableau does a great job of aggregating data to different levels of detail, the ITBS data was reported as national percentile ranking. Therefore, I had to be careful and not sum or average this data. The result was that I ended up with four sets of data (WASL, ITBS at the state and district level of detail), which resulted in the following view:

The top pair of views compares the WASL and ITBS at the state level and the bottom pair at the district level. The WASL data is percent who met standard and the ITBS data is the national percentile ranking. The lines starting at zero show the delta from the first year shown. The visual finding is pretty interesting, which is that the WASL tended upward while the ITBS stayed flat. Since the ITBS is nationally-normed, this view told me that I should not use the WASL results to inform my opinion about the math instruction in Washington State.

Many other comparative views can be designed for this data. For example, here is a view for comparing the WASL results of school districts:

This screen shot includes a quick filter on the right that can be used to select the school districts for comparison. You can download the packaged workbook and play with this view in the free Tableau Reader.

CONCLUSION:

This example contains some useful lessons:

• Data found on the web will probably require cleaning
• Be careful what you aggregate. For example, national percentile data should not be summed or averaged.
• Visual analysis is a great way to answer comparative questions as long as you have the freedom to design the appropriate view for your question.

To quote Andy, "the recent spate of acquisitions in the BI world (Cognos by IBM, Business Objects by SAP) might cause you to assume that the area was becoming mature (for which read: nothing much new to do). However there is still innovation going on. A company called Tableau... has neatly combined BI software with clever use of visualization technology."

I don't want to cite the whole thing here so be sure to check it out. And many thanks to Andy for recognizing our efforts to produce innovative and effective software.

Lastly, one special point... it was gratifying that he recognized Tableau's product tour as "very well thought out" and "very engaging (if a little frenetic), with some real thought put into the underlying data in order to show off the tool to good effect." If you've watched other product tours, you know they vary widely in quality. And if you've ever built one for your own products, then you know how hard it is to make them effective. We're lucky in that we had senior-level management driving the content of this demo and a very skilled designer well-trained in Flash.