The "Vizioneer" comes from mashing two words that have shaped my world for most of my adult life - Engineer and [data] Visualizations (or Vizes to those who know what's up). Graduating from first from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, followed by Georgia Tech with my Bachelors and Masters in Civil Engineering, all of which taught me to think through anything and everything - problem solving, "engineering" solutions, teaching to the "ah ha" moments - is what I love to do. In 2010 that investigative, engineering mindset intersected a job change and a plunge into the world of Data Analysis. In the search for the next great thing I stumbled on to a data visualization and dashboarding product called Tableau software and things just took off. So now I guess you could call me that engineer with the sweet data visualizations - or just "The Vizioneer" :)
In 2013, I joined the incredible team at Slalom, focusing on Tableau and it's been an amazing experience. Recently in 2014, I was honored and humbled to receive Tableau's highest recognition of being named a Tableau Zen Master. Follow along to see what happens next :)
They say that a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. What about when you go 8000 miles? Well for me, that journey began by staying none other then Tableau Zen Master Peter Gilks who was gracious enough to let me stay with him just a few days after having his appendix out-get well soon Peter!
Since leaving out of JFK in New York City, I’ve made the long trip across the Atlantic ocean (15 hours!) to Johannesburg, South Africa. Somewhere over the Atlantic ocean, depending on what time zone you’re looking at, the clock struck midnight and I turned 32 years old - today is my birthday!
From there, my journeys continued north to Lusaka, Zambia just a short two hour plane ride away. From the moment I landed to this moment right now, Lusaka has been an experience. Starting with the fact that their airport has no gates (they roll the stairs out to the door of the plane), to having one of the best meals of my life earlier this evening with some amazingly enjoyable company, Lusaka has not disappointed.
Here's a video of each step in the journey:
By tomorrow afternoon our entire gang should be here and we will begin the task set before us to take the next steps for the eradication of malaria and furthering our partnership with PATH.
Anyone of us would love the opportunity to know that the work that we do day in and day out has an impact on the world. One of the distinct privilege that is offered to Tableau Zen Masters young and old, is the ability to participate in the Tableau Foundation's work across the globe. Many of you know about the opportunity that I had with Peter Gilks and John Mathis to take on the Ebola project last year. It was was a project that changed me, and changed the way that I see data.
This morning I am boarding a flight to Lusaka, Zambia to take the next step in the Foundation's current focus-eradication of Malaria in Zambia. As a partnership with the Gates Foundation and an organization called PATH. I will be trying to write quick blog post each day to tell the story of what's going on and what we're doing to work with the team on the ground to bring the solution to life. Anya A'Hearn and I will be joined by three members of the PATH team on a weeklong trip to the southern part of Zambia. We will be walking through the solutions created by Jonathan Drummey, Allan Walker, Alex Duke, and Anya that will help them see and understand their data in new ways.
We're about to take off! See you soon!
The Why “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” - William Wilberforce
Sometimes I wonder ‘What if the shoe was on the other foot? What if I were somewhere else? Would someone on the other side of the planet, fight for my life?’ It reminds me of my own humanity, that we are all common in this – we are given life, and we are assured death; any power that we are given will either be used to seek more power for ourselves, or it will be leveraged to lift others up – there are but two choices. Years ago when I was presented with this truth, I promised myself that to the best of my ability, I would leverage what I’d been given to lift others up. I’m human. I’m selfish. I fail at this more than I want to think about. But every so often I like to think I find a way to deny myself and get this right. And so I wonder ‘What if the shoe were on the other foot?’.
I remember the first time I thought that. Reading about the Rwandan genocide in college made me wonder why more wasn’t done, and why did I have the privilege of being born in a ‘safe world’ where things like that don’t happen. I thought about it again when we worked on the Ebola project, literally seeing life end in the data – ‘What would happen if I were on the other side of this? I hope someone would fight for me….’
Sometimes the data shakes you up. Sometimes you see things you can’t unsee. That happened the day I stumbled into the life expectancy data and visualized evil when it took the form of genocide. The raw melancholy sense that hit me to the core and shook me up for days. I saw the death of a million people in a single line, and I couldn’t keep it inside me. I remembered thinking I had to live long enough to make sure I could publish what I’d found – the world had to see this too.
I know evil is real – I’ve seen it in the data. What I also know is that it thrives in darkness. It becomes powerless in the light. Therefore, the victory is in the awareness of the story, lest we allow our sins to repeat themselves.
This is never more true than it is with human slavery. A crime of humanity that can only exist because the rest of us see an evil so dark it forces us to look the other way. How else can you explain selling one of your children into sexual exploitation so that the rest of your family can eat for another month? How do we go on living in a world where forced labor literally works people to death? Who will stop this? Who believes it can be stopped? If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn’t you hope it could be stopped? That one day, even you could live a life of freedom? When Alex Duke brought human trafficking to the forefront, it reminded me of these thoughts all over again. I wanted to take the data and make you feel the injustice that’s actually there. I wanted you to feel and see the 35.8 million people in slavery around the world. If you take the municipal population of the 50 state capitals in the US, it would add up to 12.3 million people, a third of what’s going on. Putting it this way, in the US where there’s a little over 300 million people, were there to be 35.8 million slaves here, more than 1 out of every 9 people would be in slavery.
But that’s actually not the case here. So it’s easy to dismiss this as a problem somewhere out there in a land far far away. But I ask you again – ‘If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn’t you hope someone would fight for you?’
How do we fight a problem like human trafficking and modern day slavery? I would argue that you would battle this darkness with the only thing that come overcome it – light. So on February 26th, World Slavery Day, we paused and shined a spotlight on this issue that lives in darkness, knowing that the light overwhelms darkness every single time.
This is story I wanted to tell. These are the emotions I wanted you to walk away with. Consider this – the only people who change the world are those who believe they can. Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right. If you’re reading this, I would bet you’ve been given a tremendous amount of opportunity over the course of your life. What are you doing with that talent? What of your work will echo beyond your grave? Maybe you think you’re powerless given the scale of the problem, but I assure you you’re not. The world is changed time again by a few individuals who raise their hands and are willing to take on the challenge. I believe that’s in all of us, whether we want to admit it or not.
And this is why stories are powerful. Stories and ideas are bigger than their creators. They are not limited by hearts that pump, or air to breathe. Stories and ideas, and our reaction to them, are what change the world. And that is why we chose to tell stories. That is why we visualized this data, knowing that once you’ve seen and understood the story of the data, you would never be able to again say that you did not know.
The How I wanted to do something different. I wanted the tool to disappear and for the story to be front and center. I was inspired by three different sources to go beyond what I already knew was possible. Not too long ago I saw this piece from the NTY on OPEC Oil Prices, a beautiful ‘scrollytelling’ piece Andy Cotgreave highlighted a few months back. It struck me how immersive it was and how I felt I was on a data driven journey guided by the authors. I wanted to make Tableau do this, but I needed some additional ideas on how that could be done. When there’s something hard that I need to spitball ideas on, I call Chris Toomey. Chris had already challenged me to use JavaScript to somehow take the story I would create to the next level. I reminded him for the 117th time that “I’m not a coder” and “I don’t like coding”, yet I felt like there was never such a time to learn as this. I already had the story in my head of what I wanted to show, and Chris patiently worked with me for two hours of looking through different tools and JS libraries that might make this idea come to life. We finally settled on Slides.com and Reveal.JS based on the awesome presentation of Allan Walker, Anya A’Hearn, and Jeffery Shaffer at the Tableau Conference in October 2015, where they demonstrated the new capabilities of presenting Tableau dashboards with enhanced user experience. Given the fact that I had about 12-16 hours of time to put all this together, I decided this was the way to move forward. Lastly, I was inspired by Alex Duke whose passion for this topic required me to go above and beyond what was easy and comfortable. I’m proud of her for choosing to bring this dark topic to the forefront.
First things first, I had to create the visualizations. I had already spent a number of hours reading through the 2014 Global Slavery Index and found a number of stories I wanted to bring to light, but the data and the visualizations had to be front and center in order for the impact to be created. To be honest this was fairly simple and straight forward, as you can tell I’m not doing anything complicated with the visualizations. I needed a way to rapidly bring this together, while at the same time enhance the user experience by leveraging JavaScript to be more immersive for the end user. I’ve said it before and if you know me, you know I’m not a coder, and for that reason Slides.com was a lifesaver for me. Slides.com is like a lightweight version of PowerPoint, but with the ability to embed websites and is hosted online (public for free, private for a small cost).
As I began to test and iterate embedding these into the story on Slides.com (via iframe with the embed code off Tableau Public), I noticed something that I found to be very distracting – Tableau Public. See each viz hosted by Tableau Public has a footer at the bottom, and while we used to be able to use the embed parameters in the URL (which still works for Tableau Server btw) the newer versions of Tableau Public require that this footer shows up. I’ve also been told by Ben Jones that removing it is a no no in the eyes of Tableau based on the current license agreement. But after seeing this from Chris DeMartini where he created a polar clock and got rid of the Tableau Public footer by sizing the viz to be 100% width and 120% height, I figured I could ask for forgiveness later.
While it’s possible to include just the URL from Tableau Public, I actually ended up writing an individual html file for each of the visualizations (10 in all) that became part of the story. I did this so that I could write the custom HTML to cover the footer. Here’s an example of the code from the first map visualization:
<script> var viz, one, workbooka, activeSheet, Worksheet, worksheet;
var onePh = document.getElementById("tableauViz1");
var oneUrl = "https://public.tableau.com/views/HumanTraffickingStory/NumberInSlavery?:showVizHome=no&:display_spinner=no&:jsdebug=n&:embed=y&:display_overlay=no&:display_static_image=no&:animate_transition=yes"; //Total Number in Slavery
viz1 = new tableauSoftware.Viz(onePh, oneUrl, oneOptions); ;
</script>
</body></html>
Again, I basically took this code from Chris DeMartini, stripped out the 1 second refresh, and changed the URL to my Tableau Public workbook. Once I had done that for each of the 10 visualizations, I began to create the linear story using the Slides.com interface. Here’s a quick demo of the tool:
Once I had gotten to a place where I had finished creating slides, Slides.com gives you two options for sharing the content. They can host it – publicly (no security) for free, or include security for a small monthly fee. The other option is to export the HTML and leverage the Reveal.js library for enhanced functionality. Some of the big pluses with using the export is that you can tweak a number of things in the code including:
Pre-loading the visualizations – this is a HUGE feature. You don’t realize how distracting the load time is until it’s gone. This alone is a game changer.
Creating different transitions between background content and foreground content – Slides.com by itself does everything the same.
Ultimately I ended up using both ways of sharing. If you consumed the ‘desktop’ version of the Human Trafficking Story (bitly.com/htsdesktop) then you viewed the HTML export with the Reveal.js tweaks I made (preloading vizzes, auto-playing the video, etc….) which is hosted on a little webserver I have. If you viewed the ‘mobile’ version of the story (bitly.com/htsmobile) then you went to the version hosted by Slides.com without the tweaks. I don’t know why, but the version with the reveal.js tweaks (the ‘desktop’ version) didn’t do very well on my iPhone (it was basically unusable). I’m sure I did something wrong, but I ended up finding that the Slides.com version was solid on the mobile device.
That’s a brief dive into everything. I know I didn’t go step by step, but I’d really encourage you to just go ahead and get your hands dirty with the new toolset. Also note, I’m not saying this is the end all be all – there are thousands of JavaScript libraries that do great things like this. If I can figure out how to make this work (all for the last time, I’m not a coder) then I think it’s worth your time to give it a shot.
The Other Why
You should know the other reason I went beyond what I could do in Tableau alone was I wanted to push the envelope with Tableau and Storytelling, and put some meat on the framework that Jeffery, Anya, and Allan provided. I wanted to push and see what Tableau’s Story Points could be reimagined to become. I hope a future version offers everything you see here and more. This has helped start a number of conversations that I think could ultimately lead to a product where this could be much easier.
I’ve often heard it said that ‘Tableau is the last mile of data’ because much of the heavy lifting ETL, integration, etc… happens before the analysis and visualization. If we keep with that analogy then storytelling should be considered the last 100 yards before the finish. Presenting data and making that presentation have an impact is the whole point of visualization and analysis. If you can’t articulate the story the data is trying to convey, then all the other steps you’ve gone through to get to this point have been for not. My hope is to make sprinting those last 100 yard easier and faster as we go forward.
Matt started the first month of the Reviz Project with the
sobering topic of Gun Deaths in America.
The thing that touched me about Matt’s story was that fact that over 60%
of gun deaths in America are the result of suicide. It was also moving to note that approximately
30,000 lives are cut short by guns each year.
I think about what would have happened to those people if they’d been
able to keep on living. What would they
have done with the rest of their lives?
I choose to focus this visualization on suicide for a couple of
reasons. As Matt pointed out, this is the
majority of gun deaths, yet we’re not talking about it. Our silence allows us to pretend that it’s
not happening. Suicide is devastating. It destroys families, friendship, and
communities. It robs loved ones of a life
that is extinguished too soon and creates a gap through events that never happen and experiences
never made.
I know this because, as a freshman in high school, I went
through it. A senior, with a full ride
sports scholarship in the same sport I loved, and I guy that I’d grown up looking
up to in my neighborhood, committed suicide over winter break using a gun. The school was in shock, and we began the
year with grief counselors. I wondered –
how could anyone, even just a few years older than me, think they had the power
to take their own life? There was such
much love for him now that he was gone – why couldn’t he feel that before he
left?
These questions changed me, and each year I played I wrote a
quote in the bill of my hat in remembrance of him: “If there were no tomorrow,
how hard would you play today?”
To a certain extent I still live this way. I chance more than others think is wise. I take on enough for a 30 hour day. I tell my boys I love them until they roll
their eyes. I remember that life is sacred
and precious. We are not guaranteed
tomorrow – so how should we live today?
Those that lose their life to suicide create a loss that the
rest of the world has to life with. I
think about my friend – he never graduated high school, never took that
scholarship, never got married, never had a son to play catch with in the back
yard, never retired to sit on the front porch in a rocking chair…. There were lives he never touched, because he
wasn’t there to touch them.
That’s the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to show the volume of the years
never lived, stolen by our own hands as the result of a firearm suicide. I wanted to remind us all that those gun shots
often echo for decades, creating gaps that last a lifetime.
One of my father’s favorite movies is ‘A Wonderful Life’ where George
Bailey, in the moment he’s considering suicide, is given the opportunity to
pause and see the impact of his life.
This is done by experiencing the world as if he’d never lived. This alternative world is a shadow of reality,
so painful that he begs to go back a face his troubles, realizing that he
really does live ‘A Wonderful Life’. I
wish the stuff of movies would actually happen.
I wish those considering suicide had a chance to pause and reflect on
the void they leave behind.
So I submit The Suicide Gap to show the lasting effects that tragedy
leaves behind as its wake. May it be a
sobering reminder to us all that we never know the impact of an encouraging
word, or continuing on with a friendship that’s hanging on by a thread.
“One dataset. Three views. One conversation with multiple talking points.
“This should be our communal goal with all data visualization. Humans are social creatures. We learn through conversations. Our opinions sway and change with the ebb and flow of these conversations. Imagine being able to have this conversation with data. We needn't be content with one static chart or one interactive dashboard; we should start with a chart that asks a question and evokes a response.” - Andy Cotgreave, October 2014 (Why a Chart Should Start, Not End, a Conversation)
Why and How – for me, answering these questions has brought about the moments where things changed and perspective shifted. Focusing on these questions has brought about some of my most impactful work and has truly changed the way I see the world in the day-to-day.
Why? Why do we get out of bed in the morning? Why do we do what we do? Why does it matter? It has become apparent to me that the answer to this questions is that we are called to have an impact. Anyone can do it, but few take the opportunity to attempt to change the world. The more I interact with it and the more time I see it, the more I begin to think that telling stories with data truly can change the world. The story is the why.
How? How do we tell the stories? How do we make an impact? How do we grow ourselves and the community? Nothing gets done without intention and we don’t grow ourselves or the community by standing still. Therefore, we must be compelled to take on new challenges and be willing to fail in order to push the ball forward.
As we begin this new year I want to be more intentional about creating opportunities to have an impact by telling stories. I want to grow many ways this year, but professionally, storytelling with data is going to be my focus and to that end, I join with Alex Duke and Matt Chambers to announce the Reviz Project.
The Reviz Project The quote from Andy Cotgreave above comes from a series of events where three different people took the same data set and told three different stories through data visualizations. The data had been seen thousands of times, but by looking at it with a different perspective it was turned on its head and the stories told had a tremendous impact in three unique ways.
The Reviz Project seeks to do the same thing - take a public data set, and have its story told in at least three different ways. The goal is to change the way we look at the world and the way we look at data, and to see the humanity in both. It is not our intent for us to be the only ones involved in this project, rather we invite the community to join with us and tell their own story.
The Details Each month one of the three of us will take the lead (the leader). In the first week of the month, the leader will find a publicly available data source. In the second week of the month, the lead creates a viz that tells a story & publishes it to Tableau Public. In the third week of the month, the other two (the follow-ups) will take that same data set and create new visualizations that tell new stories. Also, at the end of the third week the data will be posted on the Reviz Project blog site. In the fourth week of the month, the community will have an opportunity to take that data set and tell their own story. Those completing their viz by the end of the fourth week can fill out a form and we will host their viz on the Reviz Project Community page. Blogging about the vizzes is not mandatory, but it is encouraged. The follow-ups and the community are allowed to enhance the data with complementary data sources, but the original data source should remain the primary focus of any visualization. The three of us are committing to doing this for at least three months.
We’re already off and running right now! Matt Chambers is taking the lead in this first month of January. Stay tuned to this blog or follow Matt, Alex, or me on Twitter to hear about the steps as they happen each month. Also, please use the hashtag #RevizProjecton Twitter.
This is an exciting opportunity for all of us that we’ve been looking forward to taking on for a few months now. We look forward to your support and hope you’ll decide to get involved. Who knows - you might just tell a story that changes the world.
A few months ago I had a bit of weird dream.Before I share it, I’ll give you that’s not
normal - but normal is boring.So here
we go: I dreamed of a new way to do Tableau dashboard actions.It literally just came to me, I saw it clearly,
and I woke up wondering why someone much smarter than me hadn’t already come up
with the idea.I told you - normal is
boring.
I’ve share the idea with Tableau – will they build it? I don’t know.
Maybe we’ll see it in Tableau 10 or it could be in Tableau 17 – the
crystal ball’s not clear. But I thought
it would be fun to share it with you all, if for no other reason to spark some
ideas of all the different things that can and should be improved/added to the
tool to make our lives easier. But know
this as well – underlying this idea this the notion that the overall user experience
of Tableau needs more attention. We can
see that Tableau’s realizing this – the new visual data window in 8.2 and
improved calculated field window in 9.0 are evidence of this – but we should
all push Tableau for more.
I’ll begin by saying something you probably won’t like. I like PowerPoint. I get why 25+ years later it’s still the
default for presentations – which often are graphical presentations of
data. Now, before you get the
pitchforks, I’m well aware that PowerPoint’s been abused, and you’ve got horror
stories 600 of slide decks with 3D pie charts – I get it. That’s not why I love PowerPoint. My love for PowerPoint comes from my friend
Mark Jackson’s suggestion of using it as a poor man’s graphic design tool, and I’ve
learned to push it to do some amazing things, creating backgrounds for many of
my best Tableau Dashboards. There’s a
number of things in PowerPoint that you should be able to do natively in
Tableau – but can’t:
Multi-select objects on a dashboard
Align objects – top, middle, bottom, left,
center, right.
Group objects together
Resize groups of objects
Move objects together
Draw shapes and do light weight design
(not to beat a dead horse but…) Auto-save :)
And saving the best for last – the ability to Zoom
in and out of a dashboard
The first thing I dreamed about was having an ability to
zoom in and out of a dashboard. Has
anyone seen Tableau on a Surface Pro 3?
It looks awful - presumably because Windows is scaling up the text 150%
(by default) and leaving this visualizations at 100%, but everything looks
cramped. Same thing on many of the Mac
displays with high pixel counts – some of the icons on Tableau become so small
they’re difficult to click and full sized dashboards take up 40% of the screen.
The point here isn’t to gripe, but to
call out why zooming is needed – the days of Tableau 4 and everyone on a 1200 x
800 monitor are gone. There are still
some unfortunate souls dealing with that set up, but most of us have decent
hardware at this point. Yet, it’s
difficult to design to the lowest common denominator without the ability to
zoom in and see what I’m doing.
So here’s what I sketched out – it’s ground breaking! It’s amazing!
It’s… exactly like PowerPoint.
Alright, hopefully you’re convinced on the need for
zoom. I’ve made a few standalone
arguments, but really the call for zoom is self-serving. I need it to exist in order to implement the
real meat of the dream: a new interactive and intuitive dialog menu for dashboard
actions.
Manually creating dashboard actions in Tableau has always
felt very un-Tableau to me. It feels
like a not-so-awesome software wizard where I’m ticking checkboxes on things
that hopefully I named. It’s also
annoying that by default everything is selected, yet there’s no ‘Select
All/None’ button. As a reminder, here’s
our current state:
Now I’m not a UX designer, and these could definitely look
better, but what if instead of having check boxes in some dialog box, they
actually resided on the sheets themselves?
If that were the case, I wouldn’t have to spin my wheels trying to
remember which one Sheet6 is, rather, I’d have an intuitive experience of:
Step 1: clicking on the source sheets
Step 2: clicking on their target sheets
Here’s two examples of what it could look like:
For those of you not into photography (like Dustin and me),
Adobe Lightroom does this effect rather well, and is probably where I got the
idea. Here’s a video showing that
experience:
Now I don’t have this whole thing figured out. I think you should do ‘selected field’ in a
drag and drop fashion, similar to the way it’s done on the new calc editor, but
I don’t know what you’d do if your sheet is too small to fit the checkbox (you
laugh, but there’s a number of Tableau hacks that people use sheets that are 1
pixel x 1 pixel – what do you do there?
I don’t know). But frankly, it’s
not my job to solve it. I’m just here to
push the ball down the field and spark a conversation.
The last thing I’ll say is that now that you’ve
seen these ideas, don’t they feel like they should have always been there? They feel logical and that they would create
a better overall user experience and adoption.
These are Tableau’s goals for their software, as they proved over and
over again, but it’s worth a discussion around points where there’s room for
growth.
If it were up to you, how would you improve the software to
make it easier and more intuitive to use?
I’d love to hear about it so feel free to drop a comment
below and then head over to the ideas section of the Tableau forum and drop it
there too (where someone from Tableau will actually read it).
Thanks as always for spending time and hanging out.
