The Art of Visualizing Survey Data

Steve Wexler, Director of ResearchThe eLearning Guild

Agenda

The eLearning Guild and how we conduct surveys and gather data

Visualizing survey data – when things go smoothly

Visualizing survey data – when things don’t go so smoothly

Say hello to the Likert scale and to heat maps/highlight tables

Anatomy of a survey visualization

Another case

Q&A

How The eLearning Guild Gathers Data

Foundation profile information Surveys

When things go smoothly

When things go smoothly

When things go not so smoothly

When things go not so smoothly

Are these items sorted correctly? It’s hard to tell.

Likert items ̶ example

Strongly agree = 5

Somewhat agree = 3

Somewhat disagree = 1

Strongly disagree = 0

Anatomy of a survey visualization

Question from the Guild’s survey on Mobile Learning.

Anatomy, cont’d

Are these items sorted correctly? It’s hard to tell.

Anatomy, cont’d

Use a calculated field to weigh the responses.

Anatomy, cont’d

Now the sort order and relative relationships really pop out.

Anatomy, cont’d

Things get even uglier when you attempt to correlate with another survey answer. Here we break the data down by where members are with implementing Mobile Learning.

Anatomy, cont’dHighlight tables to the rescue. Dark blue means “lots of agreement” and Dark orange means “lots of disagreement.” It’s very easy to see where there’s accord and where there’s discord.

Many times the option to choose a highlight table is disabled. There are ways to get around that…

Another case

Another case, cont’d

So, which product has the best break-out rooms? It’s not so easy to tell.

Another case, cont’d

Weighted responses make it easy to see how to rank the products.

Another case, cont’d

Highlight tables. They rock. In this the best product is the one with the most dark blue.

Success gallery

Q & A

Steve Wexler

The eLearning Guild

www.eLearningGuild.com

swexler@eLearningGuild.com