Data visualization workshop at ODSC East 2018

On May 1, Mark Schindler (Co-founder at GroupVisual.io) and Bang Wong (Creative Director at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) co-hosted the half-day DVUX Workshop for attendees of ODSC East.

The focus of the workshop was to discover approaches to turn data into actionable insights, combining heuristics for visual analytics with techniques from user-experience design.

In the hands-on exercise, we challenged participants to put themselves in the shoes of their user—to ask the questions a user might have when they interact with a website or application.

The participants used printouts of real-world apps and websites, overlaid with tracing paper, attendees drafted a “reverse question board“.

Question boards are a design artifact we use early in our process. They help us build the foundation for a design.

Reverse question boards help us reveal some of the design decisions behind an existing product. From this exercise, we can gain an understanding of who the product aims to serve, and what is truly important to that user. We encouraged groups to be critical, and suggest design changes that might help better answer their key questions.

In the final exercise, attendees were tasked to create a complete visualization experience, using techniques from the material covered in the workshop. Using real data from Hubway, they created a mock dashboard using pen and paper. Some groups presented their work at the end of the workshop.

One key principle of DVUX is that data visualization design has a lot of nuance when you take the user’s perspective into consideration. Notice how different each visualization looks, even though the key user question is the same for all the groups. The workshop encourages multiple perspectives and approaches to data visualization design.

“Very impressed with the workshop. This is something I would like our entire company to attend. The idea of creating visually impactful data is not something people are explicitly born with, but it’s something nearly every professional needs (sales to engineering to executive leadership)”

– ODSC 2018 workshop attendee

Visit DVUXWorkshop.com to learn more about the workshop and subscribe to event updates.