Professing her Faith in Tableau for Higher Education
Originally from Bulgaria, Elena Hristozova has been living and working in the UK for a number of years now. The 27-year-old graduated from the University of Leicester with a BA in Management and Economics in 2012 and currently works as a Planning Officer (Student Analytics) at the University of Nottingham where she uses analytics tools such as Tableau and Alteryx to develop a range of dashboards to support the strategic and operational reporting provision at the university.
Elena is also part of the innovative blog Visualising HE which focusses on using Data Visualisation in Higher Education. A recent post examining the development of a viz entitled Destination:Europe caused something of a stir on Twitter. People have begun to notice and as always we like to be ahead of (or at least in line with) the curve.
So a few days ago The Information Lab in Ireland spoke to Elena about Tableau, her involvement in an increasingly popular blog and the future of Data Visualisation in Higher Education. Her insights were stunning.
Who are the 4 people involved in Visualising HE and how did you meet?
#VisualisingHE was set up by four like-minded people who all work in the HE sector – Dave Kirk , De Montfort University, Adam Green at the University of East Anglia, Stephen Little who’s based at Durham University and I. I know Dave from the days I used to work in his team at DMU and he introduced me to Adam and Stephen. Although we don’t meet in person very often, it’s our willingness to share ideas and learn from each that has made this project possible.
How long have you been using Tableau?
I have been using Tableau since January 2015, though I feel my learning had been on a much steeper curve since I joined the Tableau community on Twitter. This is when I started developing and sharing visualisations on Tableau Public. I took part in #MakeoverMonday but then I started coming up with specific topics that I wanted to explore and visualisations that I was keen to learn how to create.
Why did you decide to create a blog for visualising higher education?
I think the idea to have a blog came second. It was one of the options we were discussing one evening when brainstorming ideas of how the project would work. We knew that there were a lot of open datasets about the higher education sector that we wanted to explore and we knew that we wanted to make it a fun experience where each of us had the opportunity to have fun playing with Tableau, practice different styles of dashboards and visualisations and have a safe environment to give and receive constructive feedback. One of the options we were considering was to publish from a single Tableau Public account but then we decided on a blog as it gave us the opportunity to show our individual approaches in using Tableau whilst keeping the content in the same place.
What do you think are the benefits of Tableau and DataViz for people working in Higher Education?
There is a lot of data available in the sector and with the rise in learning analytics, there will be even more data around us. But data is meaningless unless we can derive some insight from it. The best way to do this is by visualising it in an effective way so it’s easy to see an answer to a question, or to see what otherwise could have been left unnoticed in a series of spreadsheets. Tableau is just making this whole process extremely easy, flexible and accessible – both for the end users and for the analysts.
What are people missing by NOT using Tableau?
I think they are missing out on a lot of fun because Tableau has turned a job that can otherwise seem a bit dull (working with data and numbers) into a role that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. It can also be quite a rewarding experience, especially when you develop that one dashboard which will get the ‘Aha’ reaction from your users. Putting this into the context of the HE sector, I would say it is the flexibility. The landscape is constantly changing, which means that the questions our leaders seek to answer will keep changing too. With Tableau I know that so long as we have the data, changing the question is not so much of an issue.
What are your top tips for creating a good viz?
A viz is never perfect, so don’t wait until it’s perfect to share it or to move onto another project. I am a bit of a perfectionist and I used to take a long time before I was happy with my visualisations and deem them ‘worthy’ to go on Tableau Public. The problem with this was that the more time I spent making minor tweaks, the more ideas I would get which then meant more time spent on developing and tweaking. I’m not saying to publish without double-checking your numbers or have a quick proof-read for typos but having a focus helps.
The second thing I’d say is, get yourself a notepad and some colour pens or pencils. I have never been good at drawing but I have found sketching out ideas of dashboards on paper extremely helpful when building visualisations and dashboards – both for work and outside it. My drawings are really at a very basic standard and the final viz usually differs a fair bit from this initial design but it helps me see what might work and what might not as well as they are easy to share if you want to pick someone’s brains.
Finally I really think you should probably keep a list of ideas you have for topics, datasets, visualisations or anything new you want to explore or try. It doesn’t matter if you keep this on your phone, on your computer or in a notebook – just make sure you keep a note of these. In this way you will always have something to look forward to developing in Tableau.
Do you think everyone working in HE will eventually use Tableau/DataViz or a version of it?
Whist not every individual will, I certainly think that most departments in a HE organisation will eventually use Tableau or another data visualisation tool as part of their work. When reporting at a high-level, the value of such tools is that they can deliver invaluable insight in all essential areas for the organisation – from strategic business questions, to KPI monitoring and sector benchmarking. However, it doesn’t always have to be about the big picture – there is a lot of potential in using such tools to answer some very specific questions. For instance, I have been running a series of workshops to show colleagues across the university how to make the most of the reporting developed through Tableau and I have been approached on several occasions by users who wanted to know more about how they can start using the Desktop application to try and answer some questions that are only relevant to their area of work but would make a significant difference to them.
