Patrick Madden

After downloading but just not getting around to using the software on three separate occasions, I finally created my first chart (or should I say “visualization”) using the free Tableau Public platform. The visualization I created was for Give Me The Rock and it graphed the top 200 fantasy basketball players on a scatter plot based on how similar or dissimilar they played during the 2010-11 season.

While I am by no means an expert on using the software, here are my first impressions on Tableau Public.

The Good Stuff

I mean, let’s start with the fact that Tableau Public is free to use. In a world where I pay to drink water, that is a very good thing. Loading up the software, I noticed that the interface is very slick and creating a basic chart is fairly easy to do. I’m a guy who likes to jump in head first without reading a manual, and I appreciate I could do that and still create something cool. For the most part, the software is drag and drop with your data displayed on the left hand side of the screen and the visualization on the right. You simply start dragging your data into the appropriate place and the magic happens.

Also, the visualizations look great – on par or better than what Excel can produce. The shapes, colors, labels are all sharp and really pop on the screen. But the best thing about the software is that Tableau Public knows exactly what it is and what people use it for. The chart options that it provides seem spot on and the ease and speed at which the software allows you to slice and dice your data and the way you present it is something that Excel can’t come close to touching. For example, my visualization of 200 NBA players was original crammed on the screen, but Tableau Public has a pages option that allows you to split out your presentation into different pages which can be viewed individually. I ended up splitting my graph into pages by player position to make it more readable.

If your the type of person that likes to experiment with different ways to present data, then Tableau Public has the potential to save you a lot of time.

Finally, Tableau Public makes it incredibly easy to share visualizations on the web. It provides scripts that you can copy and paste right into your blog, as well as an option to email it to others. You can also download any visualization on the web onto your computer if you have Tableau Public. No more worrying about versions of Excel and compatibility issues.

The Bad Stuff

Like all cloud software that I’ve used, Tableau Public is a touch slow for my tastes, especially in regard to loading and saving data. For a one off chart (excuse me, visualization) I can deal with it, but given the spastic way I typically work, I wouldn’t want to work with it all day long. Tableau has professional versions of the software (for $999 and $1,999 depending on the version) that I’d assume solves this problem by not requiring you to work in a cloud.

And while the software is generally easy to use, I’d say it’s still a step or two away from being perfectly intuitive. There were a few things that took me a while to figure out. I didn’t realize you could drag the interactive legends/tools around the screen and they would be presented in that exact location when you published the visualization (very handy). And while I split my graph by player position to make it easier to read, I still wanted to add a total page that presented all the data on the screen at once. I never did figure out how to do that.

Finally – and this may bother some people more than others – while Tableau Public is free, you are required to save your visualization to their servers. Once published, your data is in the public domain for all to see. Obviously if you have proprietary data, Tableau Public is not for you (although again, the paid versions will solve this problem).

The Verdict

Overall, I’m impressed with Tableau Public. As a guy who uses Excel on a daily basis, it’s not going to replace that for my day-to-day work, but it has definite advantages over Excel like its ability to slice and dice data in any number of ways and the fact that Tableau makes it very easy to share visualizations with others. The next time I create a graph that is going to be displayed on a website, I’d hands down use Tableau Public do to that. And did I mention it’s free?

>It took Steve Jobs to do it, but the iPad has finally given the survey research industry a tool that makes the average person interested in doing surveys. USA Today (the place where I get all my news, usually in picture form) reports on companies that have started using iPads to conduct face-to-face interviews at shopping malls with glorious results. According to the article:

People “are attracted by the cool factor,” says Jude Olinger, CEO of the Olinger Group, a marketing research firm that conducted surveys at 130 shopping malls for the past two months using 200 iPads. “People who haven’t seen iPads are fascinated.”

At many of the centers, he says, response was so good that survey takers collected the required information in about three weeks instead of the four they’d anticipated.

If true, a 25% reduction in data collection time is actually a significant amount. The time and money saved not having to pay interviewers an extra week probably comes close to paying for the cost of buying all those iPads to begin with. The article mentions “clipboard-wielding researchers” and “pencil-and-paper surveys” but given these companies’ early adoption of iPads, it’s more likely that they were already using laptops or tablet PCs to conduct similar surveys. A company that is still doing pencil and paper surveys in the year 2010 is probably not going to immediately jump on the Steve Jobs bandwagon.

But the long-term rub is that while iPads are a great way to get people’s attention right now, the novelty will soon wear off. If I tried to get you to do a survey on my cool, new PalmPilot, I doubt you’d be that interested. In the same way, as iPads become more ubiquitous, the cool factor is going to go out the window along with their ability to get people do want to do surveys on them.

That being said, iPads do offer a number of advantages over old-school pencil and paper surveys, the most important of which is being able to compile, verify, analyze and report on data in real time. We’ve been able to do the same thing with PDA’s, laptops, and tablet PCs for a while now, but the iPad offers a unique combination of usability, portability and (most importantly) battery life. Much like Ron Burgundy, having 10 hours of battery life when you are conducting face-to-face interviews in a mall all day long is kind of a big deal.

History tells us that other manufacturers will eventually catch up to what Apple is doing, but until then, all hail the iPad as the survey research tool of the future. At least until people get bored with it.

>The internet represents the fastest growing and most exciting way to conduct survey research. If you’ve been online for more than a couple minutes, there is a 100% chance that you’ve either signed up to participate in an online survey or have at least been invited to take an online survey (blame those annoying pop-up surveys).

Internet surveys have grown exponentially compared to other modes of surveys because they offer distinct advantages: they are 1) quick and easy to create and implement, and 2) usually don’t cost a lot of money. The cost of an internet survey ranges from almost nothing (if you have the sample and program the survey yourself) to moderately expensive but still cheaper than a telephone, mail or in-person survey (if you have to buy sample and outsource the development of the online survey).

Internet surveys are especially good in situations where the respondents are known to you and have an interest in the subject, such as employee, membership, or customer surveys. They can be used for hard to find respondents as online sampling firms have established “panels” of respondents whose characteristics are in a database and have pre-emptively agreed to participate in surveys.

Of course, like all research approaches, Internet surveys have their weaknesses. Response rates to internet surveys are typically very low because they are usually very easy to ignore, which means that 1) you’ll need a lot of sample to complete even a small number of surveys, and 2) there is more chance that your survey results are not representative of the larger population you are targeting. In addition, there is the ‘professional survey taker’ phenomenon, where people sign up for many online surveys for the sole purpose of making money. Just check out their rules.

Internet surveys certainly have an important place in the market research toolbox (or is it a shed) – but be aware that they have some tradeoffs compared to other modes of data collection. In addition, online surveys have become much more pervasive in the past few years (how many websites now have surveys that popup when you log onto them?) meaning that they are becoming more of an annoyance as well as more likely to be ignored.

>Online focus groups are an interesting alternative to in person groups. There are two basic forms: real time Internet groups and ongoing chat rooms/bulletin boards. Compared with Internet chat rooms, a real time Internet group is more like it’s in person counterpart. Respondents log onto an Internet site and type their responses to a question posed by the moderator and to comments made by participants. Participants can see the comments of all participants and the moderator. The moderator guides the discussion by probing and moving to new topics. In addition, the moderator can communicate individually with respondents if the need arises – to encourage participation, for example.

Real time groups are generally shorter than in person groups – 60 – 90 minutes as respondents fatigue more quickly. They are limited to the same amount of participants (6-10) but can actually move along at a slower pace than traditional in person groups because people can generally talk faster than they can type. As a result, you will collect less information in a group online than you will in a traditional focus group.

Internet groups can be conducted more quickly than in person groups – as travel time is eliminated, there is less geographic concern when recruiting participants and a greater range of times are available to the researcher since participation is generally at home. They are a great way to conduct groups with the technically savvy, with hard to find respondents, or with younger respondents who are more comfortable communicating online.

Ongoing chat rooms are much like other common chat rooms. These begin with a moderator posing questions and respondents answering, as well as responding to one another’s comments at their leisure. Such groups can go on over the course of a week or more, with the moderator adding questions or redirecting discussion as needed.

One advantage of either approach is that a transcript of the dialog is available immediately after the session. Also, respondents can be less inhibited than with face-to-face groups, and therefore express deeper feelings.

If you are looking to check out online focus group software for yourself, Itracks is a common used one.