Monday, August 4, 2014

Heat Map - Visual Representation


Heat map is one of the useful and powerful data-analysis tools available in business intelligence. Heat Map is visual representation of data using colors instead of numbers only. This tool is used to analyze the complex data sets for a quick and easy way of understanding.
Popular heat maps being referred/used in the industry includes
  • Election results by geography
  • Visitors interaction with a webpage
  • Usability or consumer experience

There are many ways to create heat maps but the common understanding in all of these representation is usage of colors to communicate the numbers and their relationships. Heat Maps are mostly used for two dimensional representation. But the advanced heat maps can be drawn for more than two dimensions. For example cell size and color both can be used to represent a different relationships. One can add sliders to filter/zoom the data and its relationships as required by the user. If you have to represent the same situation using a bar chart, the visual would be cluttered and difficult to understand.

Example:

Below heat map used to understand the customer feedback from a service operations. Customer provided his feedback with the services offered by the vendor. Feedback can be positive (Happy with the service provided) or negative (Not happy with the services). Purpose of this heat map is to understand the customer view of the services provided with appropriate filters and drill-downs.


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