This is going to be a sharp departure from my usual technical how-to guides that I post. In the two years I’ve experienced several waves of changes to my work space that have been completely positive from the perspective of sharing data with people. Tableau has been remarkable in allowing me to analyze data at the speed of thought. Not only does it allow me to try things when I think of them it allows me to quickly translate what other people are thinking and show it to them immediately. At times though the audience was limited to only the people who could fit in my cube or people who took the time to interact with my workbooks on the server. Aside from the limited features of story points, it’s relatively hard to keep all viewers on the same guided path with an interactive workbook. The default view in Tableau won’t even tell you who viewed the workbook. In short, there are not many ways to let all viewers travel along the same path synchronously w/o a formal meeting time and meeting location.
Change #1: The first change I experienced was from a high-wall cube to a low-wall one. You’ve probably already realized this yourself, but it’s kind of hard to fit more than 2 people in your cubicle without feeling very cramped. But with low cube walls the audience doesn’t need to crowd into the doorway of a single cube to watch the analyst. They can be around without needing to be on top of you. It also helps with the off-hand “hey check this out neighbor” or “how do you do X in Y” type conversations.
Change #2: Then I moved positions to a work environment with stand-up desks. This allows for even more people to crowd around w/o feeling cramped since I could ditch my chair, and people didn’t have to hunch over or lean to see the monitor. I could stand, and 4 people shoulder-to-shoulder could all see the screen at once and I could walk everyone through the analysis and they could all pitch questions and engage in deep dives quickly.
Change #3: Very recently we had an Epson short-throw interactive projector installed in our room. I believe this is the same model that we have in our office (there are non-interactive versions that are about 1/2 price).
This is installed in our normal walk-space nearby my desk. Placing it in semi-public space has a two fold benefit, A) we do not have to spend square footage to have a meeting space, nor do we B) fall victim to the curse of an always-booked conference room. Since it’s short-throw, people can come and go without disturbing the image. Our particular model enables users to interact with the image on the wall. So at least 6 people can stand around and all reach out and interact with a Tableau Dashboard. The interactivity is limited (it doesn’t do right-clicks or hover-overs), but a participant can easily click a filter and change the analysis.
Conclusion: I believe that these changes have opened my mind to having a collaborative data sense-making space where everyone is on board the same train of thought when exploring the data. This method is in some ways superior to publishing an interactive dashboard on Tableau Server. First of all people may not even click on your report or see your email. Then if they do they will invariably make different choices in interaction showing different results. Thus in the end everyone gets a different experience. Tableau themselves recognized this problem and provided a method for guided analysis by adding in Story Points to previous versions.
Important Note: The situations I’ve described are strictly for collaborative ad-hoc exploratory data analysis. This is NOT a collaborative design process where loads of people tell me what color that bar chart should be or how the dashboard should look. I’ve already built the tools and we interact with them to collectively discover things.
Finished example:
Erick's On Data 