Last week I posted about how roll-ups in the time-series back-end used by Project Dasher enable some interesting visualization opportunities. When my colleague Hali Larsen saw the post, she made a really interesting suggestion:
It would be cool if the user could select whether the heatmap visualizes the Max, Min, or Average of the data for the selected rollup. (Yet another drop down…) The advantage would be that someone looking for a feature in the data would see the “spikes” whereas when you use the rollups as they currently work you lose a lot of the variability of colour due to the smoothing out of the values associated with the rolled up data through averaging.
This was one of those insightful comments that I simply couldn’t ignore… I could immediately see a lot of potential for this mechanism (without knowing how it might be implemented). One great example – that we’ll come back to later – being the ability to scan the maximum values of “Presence” data for…