You likely know that data science is a growing career field, and both data analysis and data visualization skills are in demand. We believe those skills are so important, we’ve created a page that shows how these skills benefit your career and organization and how to uplevel your data science skills.
But when considering what to invest in for career growth or thinking how to best help their organization, people sometimes have a problem, pardon the pun, visualizing how data analysis and data visualization skills will help them in their career. They think, “I’m taking a table with numbers and making it into a chart.” Yes, that’s one type of visualization, but when done well, visualizations can be so much more.
Now we’re going to show you some of our favorite visualizations. While we’re at it, we’ll look at how data visualizations are used across a number of roles, talk about the tools used, and show you how acquiring these skills can be a differentiator for your career.
Use Case: Data Exploration
One of the best uses of data visualizations is to enable people to see data in ways they could not before. This is often done by bringing insightful data forward so it is not obscured by other data or displaying it in a way that allows you to see a correlation that wasn’t obvious before.
Interactive Government Budget 2016
The United States federal budget is extremely complex. Most people don’t track it closely. We might know the particulars about programs or projects that are important to us, and we likely often wonder where all our tax dollars go. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to address that issue by creating an interactive budget chart.
This shows how well visualizations can show and explain complex data and how they allow people to explore numbers in ways that they would not normally be able to. By spending only a few minutes with this visualization, you will likely discover things you didn’t know and get insights into how your tax dollars are used.
Source and for more information: Try the real interactive 2016 here to see where your tax dollars went.
Tools: This type of interactive treetop can be created in Tableau or Power BI or through coding.
US 2T Stimulus Bill
Similar to the visualization above, this visualization by user SevenandForty posted in the dataisbeautiful subreddit shows where the money from the 2 Trillion dollars of the 2020 stimulus package went.
This is a Sankey Diagram, which is a unique type of flow diagram for visualizing source-to-destination types of data. Marketers may be familiar with it because Google Analytics offers a Sankey diagram for tracking user flow through websites (this was formerly called the user flow diagram, and Google Analytics 4 is the path exploration). While the above diagram simply shows originating funds to end spending, Sankey diagrams can be very helpful for tracking decisions and can highlight cause and effect. Using Google’s path exploration as an example, that diagram can help you isolate pages that are making visitors leave your website.
This Sankey diagram helps you see exactly where the funds are going and compare which sectors and services got the most funds.
Source and for more information: r/dataisbeautiful
Tools: This type of interactive treetop can be created in Tableau or Power BI, but it is not a default chart type, so custom-calculated fields and bins must be created in order to make a visualization like this. But that only takes about 10 minutes.
Use Case: Information Presentation
Sometimes visualizations are just much better at conveying information in a meaningful way by showing instead of telling.
Every Upcoming Solar Eclipse
What to know when you can see the next eclipse? This simple yet elegant animated visualization shows every upcoming eclipse and where it can be seen from Earth:
Not only is the page a great source of information about eclipses, the visualization the interactive visualization shows you where you can see an eclipse!
Source and for more information: The Washington Post
Tools: This is a custom visualization created by laying different color lines on a 3D globe. The interactive portion allows users to grab and turn the globe. You can create a similar visualization with something like Tableau or Power BI using a flat map of the earth and plotting geographic coordinates of eclipse paths, javascript, python or some other scripting or programming language is required to cradle the globe interactivity.
The Increasing Number of Data Breaches
Another great visualization from the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful. When viewing the source and more information for this interactive visualization, be sure to scroll down to look backward in time at previous years. Doing that shows you how the number of breaches is growing.
The visualization has many interactive elements. In addition to scrolling down or up to move backward or forward in time, you can hover over any breach to get a summary of the events and click the text to be taken to a web page about the event.
Source and for more information: r/DataIsBeautiful
Tools: This visualization is essentially a packed bubble plot with the size of the data breach determining the size of the bubble. The information is plotted vertically by year and horizontally by month. A plot like this can be created in Tableau or Power BI and can be made interactive with Actions in both tools, where you can add more data (such as the event summary) on mouse hover and provide a linked URL when clicked.
Use Case: Dashboards - Visualizing Information and Correlating Data
Dashboard visualizations are great for many things, they:
Let you see updates at a glance.
Bring the most important information to the forefront.
Let you filter information so you can focus on what you’re interested in.
They let you see correlations between data.
Visualizing Sales and Sales Pipelines
Sales dashboards are one of the most common types of dashboards as they allow salespeople, managers, and executives to visualize where deals are in the sales process, which customers you’re talking to, and which salespeople are engaging. Tableau has several examples of sales dashboards:
This next dashboard gives sales analysts, managers, and executives insights into what deals are in the pipeline, what opportunity stage they’re in, how big they are, and which sales reps are driving them to show performance and estimate resource needs and inbound revenue.
Source and for more information: Tableau Blog
Tools: This visualization was created in Tableau and could also be created in a tool like Microsoft Power BI.
Visualizing Supply Chain Issues
This dashboard used by a grocery retailer aims to address supply chain issues and help ensure that the correct products are stocked at the correct inventory levels in the correct stories. The dashboard helps logistics analysts and procurement experts analyze product availability by category, supplier, day, and store region, drill into details and find ways to optimize the supply chain.
Source and for more information: Tableau Blog
Tools: This visualization was created in Tableau and could also be created in a tool like Microsoft Power BI.
Visualizing Real Estate Trends
Data visualizations can help realtors and real estate companies know to set the best listing price for sellers and provide the best buying advice to buyers. Reports can show many things, and the report below seeks to answer one of the first questions all sellers and buyers have, “Is this a good time to enter the market?" The dashboard below helps buyers and sellers see trends in the market, the volume of homes on the market, and if prices are rising or falling. This arms buyers and sellers with better information, allowing them to make better decisions.
Source and for more information: Tableau Blog
Tools: This visualization was created in Tableau and could also be created in a tool like Microsoft Power BI.
Use Case: Telling a Story with Visualized Data
Storytelling is an art form that resonates. As people, we pass along and absorb events, perspectives, and lessons learned through stories. So what is a data-visualized story? It’s adding data and information to a story, or, from a different perspective, adding dates, times, outcomes, and results or impact to data to show events progressing over time and their cumulative impact as well as the final outcome.
Napoleon’s Disastrous Russian Campaign of 1812
One of the most famous data-visualized stories is Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The visualization has two dimensions and shows six types of data:
The number of Napoleon's troops: Perhaps the most compelling part of the graphic is the number of troops which is shown by the width of the tan and black lines as they move east into Russia, then retreat back. The width is one millimeter per 10,000 soldiers. Numbers are also written beside the zones.
Distance. In leagues, see the scale on the mid-lower right.
Temperature. The table at the bottom is overlaid with data, and with the temperature scales on the lower right.
Latitude and longitude.
The direction of travel. Represented by the tan (red) and black lines of soldiers moving left (east to Moscow), then right (west) back to France.
Location is relative to specific dates. Overlaid on the graphic table.
Source: Wikipedia article. See also the enlarged map.
Tools: Tableau has a story visualization that allows you to put events together to tell a story with different visualizations in different ways. You could use Tableau to create a story that would showcase the different elements of data shown in the visualization above, though not likely in quite the same way. To recreate this visualization with these dimensions and stats, you would likely have to create it in code using something like Python.
Use Case: Research, Investigation, Making your Point
Sometimes telling isn’t enough. You have to show your work to get in order to make your point.
1854 Broad St Cholera Outbreak
In 1854, London had a serve outbreak of cholera in Broad St. in the Soho district of the City of Westminster, London, England. It caused the death of over 600 people and was studied by John Snow (not the Game of Thrones character, but a real Physician in London). He made a great visualization that showed clusters of cases using vertical bars laid over locations on a map of the Soho district, as well as the pumps and water lines feeding the area with (as he determined) contaminated water.
The result changed the scientific understanding of how cholera spreads. Previously thought to be transmitted through the air. After doing the research and focusing on death rates, Snow came to believe contaminated water was the source. In fact, it was, as water companies were delivering untreated and highly contaminated water from the river Thames.
Source and for more information: Wikipedia
Tools: To recreate this today, you might use Tableau or Power BI, but instead of bars, use a bubble chart over a map or a density map to show the clusters of cases.
Florence Nightingale - Causes of Mortality Armies of the East
Florence Nightingale was a nurse and a pioneer in many ways. She authored over 150 books, pamphlets, and reports on health issues and is probably best known for helping improve sanitary conditions. She was also a mathematician who pioneered the use of what we now call the polar area diagram pie chart. In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 1874 she became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
Perhaps her best know data visualization was created to drive home her point that the mortality rates of British soldiers in the Crimean War were greatly exacerbated by poor sanitary conditions in hospitals.
The Diagram of the Causes of mortality in the army in the East" helped show that bad drainage, contaminated water, overcrowding, and poor ventilation were causing the high death rate among British army casualties in India. “Following the report, The Royal Commission on India (1858–1863) concluded that the health of the army and the people of India had to go hand in hand and so campaigned to improve the sanitary conditions of the country as a whole
Nightingale made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life and was the leading figure in the introduction of improved medical care and public health service in India. In 1858 and 1859, she successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Royal Commission into the Indian situation. Two years later, she provided a report to the commission, which completed its own study in 1863. "After ten years of sanitary reform, in 1873, Nightingale reported that mortality among the soldiers in India had declined from 69 to 18 per 1,000".[68]: 107
Source and for more information: Wikipedia and Diagram of Causes of mortality in the army in the East.
Tools: To recreate this today, you might use Tableau or Power BI.
Impact of Fossil Fuels on CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere
Data visualizations are part science and part art. Depending on the creator’s creativity, the art might functional, compelling, or even beautiful. Some visualizations transcend even that.
This visualization does an excellent job with the scientific part of data visualization. It shows the increasing amount of fossil fuel emissions on the bottom, with marks getting denser as you moved through time from 1850 to 2100, and the corresponding increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The art portion of this visualization is stunning. It looks like smoke rising into the atmosphere and getting denser with every passing day.
Source and for more information: Behance
Tools: This was created using D3.js, a javascript library for manipulating documents based on data. Recreating would require scripting or coding.
The Danger Posed by Iceberg A68a
Here’s the difference between telling and showing:
Telling: “Hey, there’s a really big iceberg moving into the South Pacific, and the collision could cause an environmental catastrophe.”
Showing: “Hey, there’s a really big iceberg moving into the South Pacific, and the collision could cause an environmental catastrophe. Look how big it is!"
Source and more information: Reuters
Tools: There is more than one visualization in the source article. Some of the maps can be recreated in tools like Tableau or PowerBI by plotting travel paths over maps. Some of the size comparison visualizations can be recreated using a tree diagram. The visualization shown above would be rather simple to recreate by combining images in any tool such as Visme or even Google slides, provided you keep the proportions correct.
Conclusion
Now that we’ve shown you some of our favorite data visualizations, let me ask you a question; if you had built one of these visualizations for a presentation, how would it have helped your career?
All of them are compelling and brilliant in their own way, some were pioneers, and others verge on works of art. You can build visualization like these with the right training and practice. While you’re working on that, we encourage you to remember that the true power of data visualizations comes from the simple fact that they make things easier to see and understand. That power can be seen in even the simplest visualizations like the one above. To see more about how data analysis and data visualization skills can help your career and organization, and how to start your data science journey on our Data Analysis and Visualization for Career Growth page.
