At-a-glance Visualization & Analysis of Complex, High Volume Information - Using Heat Maps
by LogiXML BIz Comm Editorial Staff
November 6, 2006
In today’s fast-paced environments, scanning through rows of data can be rather time-consuming and impractical. Many business personnel want easy-to-use visual tools to see accurate, real-time business-critical information. They may need to start with the big picture and further explore the details as needed. Or, they may need to spot exceptions and identify emerging trends to take immediate, appropriate action.
What Are Heat Maps?
Tree and heat maps are somewhat new concepts in BI but are quickly becoming mainstream for the powerful automated and effortless analysis they give to users. They are useful for giving business users quick views of large amounts of data to find trends and anomalies at-a-glance.
Mainstream Examples
Mainstream examples include those used on various financial and stock market Web sites. Nasdaq.com and SmartMoney.com both use heat maps to show stock price and various market sector performance at-a-glance. Visitors to these sites can mouse over or drill down to get further details about a stock’s current performance.
A more creative example is Peet’s Coffee, who, on their Web site, PeetsCoffee.com, uses a heat map as a ‘Coffee Selector,’ which lets customers view category and body of the coffee. This makes it easy for customers to compare prices and features of all of their coffees in a single view, without scrolling through lists or clicking between Web pages.
Heat Maps Are Useful for Visualizing Hundreds or Thousands of Data Points
It would be very difficult to view and comprehend information about 2,000 items in a pie chart; a heat map, however, makes this possible. Heat maps can show relationships among hundreds or thousands of items in hierarchies with rectangular spaces divided into regions. Each region is divided again to correspond to each level in the hierarchy. Business users easily interact with these hierarchical, colorful regions to get more information.
How Heat Maps Work
Most heat maps allow users to view details simply by mousing over a region. Users can also change grouping options, color and size to follow hunches and view data from many different perspectives. Slider controls let users interactively exclude and filter irrelevant data to show just those items that are of interest.
Heat maps are especially useful when an organization has numerous factors to analyze, such as many sales regions, many manufacturing plants, or hundreds of product lines and wants to monitor the complex activities among those many products, projects, or salespeople.
Next ... Benefits of Heat Maps
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