In this 4 part series of posts I’m going to be looking at ways of visualizing survey data to speed up the insight process.
This post looks into using a pretty cool visualization technique called a Tree Map to represent the data that would traditionally be looked at in a Cross Tab.
TreeMaps from the Beginning
Tree Maps are an Area oriented way of showing data, for instance if you had some Top-Line responses to a question as follows:
| 11-16 years |
38 |
| 17-20 years |
82 |
| 21-24 years |
95 |
| 25-34 years |
192 |
| 35-44 years |
91 |
| 45-54 years |
55 |
| 55-64 years |
33 |
| 65+ years |
16 |
It’s TreeMap respresentation would be as follows:
This provides a very instant read for the viewer who can immediately tell not only which the largest and smallest segments of their sample are but also what the real proportions are. Therefore it’s doing the job of a sorted table that has percentages. In essence its an Analog view of the data much like comparing an Analog to a Digital watch.
why Treemaps suit Tables
The tables we get all the time in market research put a lot of information in front of the person who’s trying to make gain insight. This kind of table is really common:
There’s really a lot of information for the brain to consume in order to build an insight, its all very digital and it takes a long time to process. The Analog view of this is very different:
But Oh! There’s More
Tree map’s have 2 main visual indicators available to them, the first being Area, the second being Color, so far the examples have had both driven by proportion of responses. Here’s an example where the Color is being driven by something different, in this case, the Color on is being driven by Mean score on another question (the proportion is still being driven from the sample size).
Not only can you easily tell that the 55-65 age group is rating a product pretty high but you also have the visual warning that the insight might be based on a fairly small sub-group.
Wow, how did you do this/How can I do this?
There’s no cheating, we built an app platform quite a while ago now for feeding on survey results which we use for all kinds of visualizations. Then we built a demo app on the top of that which presents data from regular/real surveys into a TreeMap.
The demo app is built using the Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit, and is reading data from our insightMart data warehousing system (the data is sample data and didn’t come from a real market research study in this case).
We can build this kind of visualization and many others for people’s dashboards or presentations very quickly, the data doesn’t even have to come from survey’s.