Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like bananas.
With that admittedly horribly pun out of the way, let's get down to business: How do YOU visualize TIME?
I've been working on a number of projects and I'm curious how others creatively conceptualize discrete values over time. Think of it as a tick-tock talk!
For example, I have a fun little view I use for showing PTO for employees. It's broken into a hierarchical structure so managers can easily locate their team.
- The location of each dot is reflective of the date of PTO
- The size of the dot represents the number of hours (from 2-8)
- The color represents the type of time off (we only have a few).
- Hovering shows detail in full.
I don't need to do much explaining for mangers to "get it" (which is a big win for me), but I'm always looking for something better. Here's a blurry snapshot:
What ideas do you have for graphing time?
What has been effective for you-- as far as accessibility and speed?
This is a great question, and Viz Talk is the appropriate place for this type of discussion.
This is a Gantt chart I did showing what songs played from each of our studios for each of our radio networks. Each bar "chunk" begins at the time of day the song starts, and the length is the duration of the song. The color is an indicator of the data quality for that song.
I did a Tableau box-and-whisker plot for our HR department to show the distribution of how long each step in the hiring process takes, with a dot for each position. (Don't get me started on why some of these steps take so long!)
Then, the most obvious is just changes in metrics over time, with reference lines. The color of the line represents the dollar volume.
At least that gives a few more ideas. Looking forward to seeing others.
