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05 - Design Thinking and Visualizations - en

Design thinking is a user-centric process used to solve complex problems through alternative strategies and challenging assumptions. It involves empathizing with users, defining their needs, ideating potential solutions, prototyping visualizations, and testing them. Airbnb used this approach when photos of listings weren't generating enough bookings - they took professional photos which doubled bookings and revenue. Data analysts can apply design thinking to ensure visualizations meet users' needs and are engaging and informative.

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Thu Hương
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80 views2 pages

05 - Design Thinking and Visualizations - en

Design thinking is a user-centric process used to solve complex problems through alternative strategies and challenging assumptions. It involves empathizing with users, defining their needs, ideating potential solutions, prototyping visualizations, and testing them. Airbnb used this approach when photos of listings weren't generating enough bookings - they took professional photos which doubled bookings and revenue. Data analysts can apply design thinking to ensure visualizations meet users' needs and are engaging and informative.

Uploaded by

Thu Hương
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Hey, welcome back.

We've covered a lot of ground in our


exploration of data visualizations. We've talked a lot about how your
audience should be the focus when you are making decisions about charts,
colors, space, labels and everything else that goes into a data viz. Now let's talk
about design thinking. Design thinking is a process used to solve
complex problems in a user-centric way. When you bring design
thinking into your work, you're trying to identify
alternative strategies for your visualizations that might
not be clear right away. You have to challenge
your own thinking and explore different ways of approaching
the problems and finding solutions. Airbnb is one example of a company that
use a design thinking approach to help their business grow. When the company a
vacation rental
online marketplace, wasn't generating as much revenue as they wanted,
they decided to start experimenting. Even though the data they collected and
analyzed was valuable, they needed to look at their product
through the eyes of the customer. They realized the photos of the places
that customers were seeing just weren't very good, so they decided to help
their customers replace the not so great photos with more
professional looking ones. So they hired a photographer and went door to door to
take professional
photos of their New York City listings. In a week, the listings with these photos
saw 2 to 3 times more bookings, and their revenue nearly doubled, thanks to their
new design thinking, user based mindset. If design thinking can work for
companies like Airbnb, it can help data analysts too, and data
visualization is the perfect stage of your analysis to apply a user based mindset.
If you use design thinking when planning
and creating your data viz, you'll be making decisions based on the needs of
the people who will be viewing them. This way your audience will be engaged and
enlightened by how you
visualize your findings. While the design thinking process
comes in lots of different forms, they all have stages or phases. We'll talk about
five phases that you can
use when creating data visualizations, empathize, define, ideate,
prototype, and test. In the spirit of design thinking, these phases don't have
to follow a set order. Instead, think of them as
an overview of actions that can help you produce a user centered
design in your visualizations. In the empathize phase you
think about the emotions and needs of the target audience of your
data viz, whether it's stakeholders, team members or the general public. Here you
should avoid areas where people
might face obstacles interacting with your visualizations. For example, let's say
you've been working
on an analysis for a pharmaceutical company about how patients have
been responding to a new treatment. You're getting ready to visualize
the data, so you should think about the audience, which will include
stakeholders like pharmacists, doctors and other medical professionals. Maybe
you're thinking of using
a color scheme that you like, but you realize that these colors might
be a challenge to some people. The colors might be too bright or
dramatic, which might not be right for the seriousness of the data. Or the colors
might not
have enough contrast for people who have color vision deficiencies. By adjusting
the colors, you'll be empathizing with
the needs of your audience. If there's someone on your
team who is vision impaired, you want to find a way to explain
the data verbally as well. The define phase helps you to find your
audiences needs, their problems, and your insights. This goes hand in hand with the
empathize
phase as you'll use what you learned in that phase to help you spell out
exactly what your audience needs from your visualization. You could use this phase
to think about
which data to show in your visualization. Maybe this data viz will also be
presented
to patients who are part of your company's study. While you'll need to meet your
objectives, there might be data that could
make these people uncomfortable. You can think of ways to position
that data to make it more digestible. Or if you're presenting
to different audiences, you can adjust your visualizations to meet
each group's needs by seeking input from members of the group or colleagues
who've worked with that group before. In the ideate phase,
you start to generate your data viz ideas. You'll use all of your findings
from the empathize and define phases to brainstorm
potential data viz solutions. This might involve creating drafts of
your visualization with different color combinations or
maybe experimenting with different shapes. Creating as many examples as possible
will help you refine your ideas. The key here is to always remember your
audience when coming up with ideas and strategies. You want to think about how you
can
position your visualizations to meet the needs and
expectations of your audience. The final two phases are prototype and
test. Here you'll start putting your charts,
dashboards or other visualizations together. If you've kept your audience in mind
through all the phases to this point, then your data viz will be informative and
approachable. You might want to create lots of
visualizations to choose which one best meets your objective. You could test your
visualizations by
showing them to team members before presenting them to stakeholders. If you've
created more than one for
the same data, or for different audiences like
the medical professionals and the patients from our earlier example,
you can share all of your options. As always, listen to any feedback you get.
Critiques both your own and others
are key to the design thinking process. They help you keep your focus on the
audience by integrating new ideas in your final product. The phrase thinking
outside
the box is used a lot, but it definitely applies here. The box in this case is your
own
usual way of approaching data, and its visualization. If you embrace design
thinking, you'll be able to create super
effective data viz for any audience. Up next, we'll cover more things you
need to consider within your data viz. See you there.

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