Lately I’ve been seeing a ton of new data visualization tools/experiments that I thought were worth sharing. One is not really applicable to web analytics or reporting, but others are.

Trendly

I saw a post about Trendly on the Google Analytics Blog, its an application that leverages GA data to display it in a way that is supposed to help you understand the data better. From what I can tell, they use statistically significant numbers (between the upper and lower control) to show a trend-line that is less jagged and crazy. I think that is helpful for noting the big picture of change over a longer time span, but less so if you want to do a deep dive. Which might be besides the point. And then their other graph shows time vertically (I’ve always had issues with that metaphor), and the percentage of traffic from that source correlates to thickness. Its easier to show than tell so here it is:

Trendly time graph

Darwin’s Origin of Species

This is the English major in me geeking out, but I think this changing textual visualization by Ben Fry (go to the site to see it in action) is a great way to show how different editions of an important book like this can change. I’d like to see it for Lyrical Ballads. This is from the information aesthetics blog again, but I think its cool.

Darwin visualization

California Stimulus Map

I should probably find some more data visualization blogs, but I like the information aesthetics finds so much. This interactive map by Stamen Design shows where stimulus money is being spent in California, and what kinds of projects it goes to. The subject matter is worthwhile, but mainly I liked the vertical graph on the right side, I find that visualization easier to duplicate (in Excel!) and translate to different data sets than the one in Trendly. I will try to sneak it into a report at some point, and I’m sure I will get a WTF reaction, but it would be more interesting than the standard Excel graphs for me and the reader.

CA stimulus map

Otherwise I am having fun with my new G1 phone, new running shoes, and I’m going to Arizona this weekend–good times! Hoping to get some hiking in if it is not over 100° outside.

Omniture

These topics may not be entirely related, but I am making them related because I don’t want to devote an entire post to each one. Between playing with Bentley and watching reality tv on Bravo, I played around with Omniture, an enterprise tool for web analytics.  I read some about page tagging variables in Omniture, but I’m not quite sure I understand when you use eVar versus sProp for every situation. Because my primary experience is with Google Analytics, what I’m noticing so far is the difference between the 2. Main things I’ve noticed:

1. Omniture has way way more metrics that can be measured with a lot of granularity.
2. Google Analytics has a better UI and is more concerned with making things easy for the user (novices especially), so metrics like bounce rate are automatically calculated for you.
3. I like the visualizations better in Google Analytics and the site overlay tool helps to show click maps visually on any page in the site.
4. Omniture might help make more informed decisions because it is drawing so much more data and aggregating it for the user.

Overall I think I will grow to like Omniture more because it is so powerful, but I wish that they would include some of the better visualization tools from Google Analytics, or calculate bounce rate for me. Maybe that is asking too much, but from what I hear, free tools like GA are catching up to Omniture and WebTrends quickly, so they might offer the same things eventually.

Google Fusion Tables

I had never heard of Google Fusion Tables before, but that might be because its in Pre-Alpha right now. It basically takes data sets from things you import (like spreadsheets/csv files) and uses different visualizations like the ones in Google Analytics and Google Maps.  One cool part of this new tool is that it allows collaboration and you can combine other tables if they have the same columns (because its probably treated like tables in a database). They also allow sharing of certain sections (like database views I’m guessing), and easy online publishing of the visualization.  There is a lot of potential to use this in web analytics I think, but so far I found the visualizations and UI to be somewhat confusing to manipulate. Below is a motion chart showing predicted temperature change for the US.

DD4D

Finally to continue the visualization fixation I have, I found a cool blog, information aesthetics, that posted about the DD4D (Data Designed for Decisions) conference. There were some cool things, but what I thought was most interesting was a way to show the overall change in various factors of a problem, which predicted an end result. It would be interesting to try, but I’m not sure how you assign numeric value to subjective things in a meaningful way.

DD4D Sense Change Making Visualization

Wow. Longest post ever. So now I’m going for a run to not think about web things for a little bit.

Such good weather in Seattle today! Totally makes up for the last couple weeks.  I did nothing productive except tan at Greenlake and drink tasty beer. Tonight I’m going to taste home brewed beer that my friends make. It is (usually) surprisingly good. My friend Cailey also successfully completed her first marathon today, and finished in 4:27:51!  She is far more awesome than I for doing that.

And R.I.P. to my favorite sandals. You have lasted since 2002 in Berkeley. Way to break right as I was running to catch the bus. Also what is it with guys and nice weather who think that whistling at me is a classy way of communicating?

Why can I not stop making changes to the site!? Just when I was done getting things looking ok in IE, I go and change the portfolio layout to a tabbed box (which I had wanted to do for awhile, but still). So now I must deal with IE-related nonsense again. Blar. I don’t know why I torture myself like this: I looked at how it looked in Opera and there were a few minor padding issues. I will not deal with it now.

UPDATE: IE was actually an easy fix, but then I realized that the search box was messed up on the blog. 2 hours later realized it was a CSS issue where one div was too big and overlapping the sidebar so you couldn’t interact with the search box, or text, or links. Entirely my fault.

Bentley

In other news, its hard to make sure I run when the weather is blah. I think I was meant to be living in a warmer climate. I blame the Puerto Rican influence.  Also, today is the last day to hang out with my sister and her puppy Bentley.  This means I either have to wait until she’s back to see them again or I have to make the trek out to Pullman and the middle of nowhere.