How To Reveal The People In The Data

Charts, maps, and graphs are, by nature, abstractions. And it can be easy to forget about the folks that the bars, circles, and lines represent. Plus sharing information on your clientele presents not only a visualization challenge, but also a privacy challenge since we rarely have permission to share information on all of our participants. Here’s my answer to that challenge. First, get permission from a handful of participants to share their stories. This visualization (pictured below) provides an example of what we could do with that information. Each chart represents individuals with distinct shapes. And scrolling over shapes colored in yellow on the interactive version reveals a photo and profile of an individual participant in select groups. Thus the charts convey both the aggregate story and individual stories. Try interacting with it yourself here. I built this example using Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau.

And here is some more information on how to show the real people behind the data. To see past data tips, click HERE.