Three more Ws

- [Instructor] So in the last movie we talked about the 6 Ws and how useful they can be to help you find the hierarchy in your information and figure out not only what story you're trying to tell but how to tell that story in your visualization projects. There are actually 3 more Ws that I think are equally as important. In this movie, we're going to talk about the other questions you should ask yourself when going through and designing your projects. The first one is what I call What's Wanting? What's missing from the data you have? In the end, you almost always are going to be missing data.

Your client gives you data and theres maybe the granularity of the data is missing, or there's a column missing, or questions missing from a survey that you could use. And there are really three things you can do about that. The first one is keep calm and power on. The fact is sometimes that's all you can do. Sometimes you are not going to get the data that's missing. It's good to be aware of it and to know it maybe in a way to help you design around it so you know to not sort of, steer the visualization towards a question or answer you don't have. But the fact is, you're just going to have to kind of power on in the majority of cases.

The second thing you can is you can go back to the source. You can ask your client for the missing data. If a field was left out of a data set, they may have that data. They may not have thought that you needed it. Ask them for it. Because sometimes they'll be able to give it to you. The final choice is really the least likely to happen. It almost never happens from my experience. Is you can generate more data. So if you're doing a visualization of survey data, let's say, and the question wasn't asked, you can always go back and ask that question, right? You know, redo the survey, or add a question to the survey.

Like I said, it's not very common, but if you can do it, it's a great thing to do. The second one is what I call what in the world? And by that I mean, a lot of times you can find other data from other sources to bring into a project. A lot of times, the data that you have tells a very specific story, but it can benefit from context. And so if you can find data from other sources, maybe it's a census data, or World Bank data, it will help complete the picture. It will help complete the story you're trying to tell in a way that the primary data that you have just can't do.

So in the example of the HOSPITAL PRICING visualization that I showed in the last movie, in this case, I was taking data from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare services, which was really just hospital pricing data. But the question I was trying to answer was where could I go to get a hip replacement, or any other procedure done, for a good price and good quality. And quality was not provided in the data that I was given. So I went out and found also, hospital quality data, which happened to also come from Centers for Medicaid and Medicare services, but this data really provided the context, and in this case, really completed the picture of this.

It's not just about getting a cheap surgery done, it's also about getting a good job done. So, quality was very important, and I could not have done it without getting that outside data to help. And so the third one is what I call what's wild? And by this I mean that sometimes you want to take a little bit of an out of the box approach, whether it's to capture a user's attention, or to really tell a new and interesting story. And it can really mean a couple of different things. One is it can mean that you're just going to take a very unique visual approach to your data. You're not going to show just a bar chart, you're going to try to do something very unique visually to show something and we'll talk more about that in other videos.

Sometimes it's about bringing in some unexpected contextual data. So maybe instead of World Bank data, you want to bring in some data from another source that is sort of counterintuitive, or different, that might bring some really interesting insights to a project. Or, maybe you want to create a really out of the box interactive experience to help bring the data to life in a new and interesting way. A very simple example of maybe not what's wild, per se, but what's wild helped get me here, was I was doing a visualization, looking at some survey data.

So in this case, you can look through and let's say, pick a question. So, in this case was, what percentage of consulting firms think that offline marketing is going to be more or less important over time. And it's about Leaders vs Laggards, alright? The people who lead the industry versus the people who are sort of behind the industry. What's the difference between the two? And as you can see, these are essentially bar charts that sort of slide in from the outside. And, the way I got to this was thinking about what's wild? What can I do that's a little bit different? I was actually drawing on a white board, and I was leaning sideways as I was trying to draw these bars.

And it occurred to me that by looking at them sideways, it might bring an interesting perspective. Because in this case, I was really all about showing the gap between these two things. Showing it this way, how these things come to the center, and where the gap is between them, was just an interesting way of visualizing this data. It's not revolutionary, for sure, but its sort of an evolutionary visual display by thinking about what's wild. By sort of trying to get a little bit outside the box. Looking at, from another perspective, just the real percentages as opposed to emphasizing the differences, then more traditional bars that grow from the inside out.

But again, are sort of flipped on the side, and sort of animating them to come to life a little bit. So the three Ws will really help you to push the boundaries a little bit, when you're brainstorming, to try to find the hierarchy that you're looking to tell in your projects. You know, what's missing? What in the world can I find to add context to it? And how can I push the boundaries a little bit? How can I bring a little bit of excitement and interest into a project? If you add these to the six Ws, and you will always be able to find your way into projects like this.