More recently we’ve been getting more in depth on Tableau and just getting into the basics has shown me the potential knowing this tool has on my career and life. These past two weeks we participated in two assignments that had us develop multiple visualizations. The first one we worked on was the NYC Uber one where we had to try to show convincing data points that portrayed correlations between weather and holiday pickups. To say the least, this was my reintroduction to Tableau and was a bit rusty and elementary with my graph building skills. I made a line chart mixed with an area chart, packed bubbles chart, and a bar chart. The second assignment had to do with some Cincinnati guy’s collected data that kept track of Halloween trick or treaters since 2011. I tried to get a little more advanced with this one by tying in data from Cincinnati’s archive of crime reports. I made three simple charts that were pretty descriptive, but was not able to tie in that data. I believe the file was corrupted but I cannot be sure. The top one is my NYC Uber topic and the bottom half is my Cincinnati Halloween assignment.

In class recently, we’ve been covering the psychology of visual perception I guess you could say. We covered how attributes like color, texture, orientation, shape, etc. play into our perception of information. We also considered how each of these attributes play with our three types of memory. If you want to make your message memorable you have to design your visual around the ticks of the human brain. Without doing so, our audience would simply forget what we’re trying to convey.