1. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 1
Case: Creating a Visualization for
Bilateral Trade by Country
A Before-After Case Study showing the power of applying
Visualization technologies to legacy data
2. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 2
• User had to know the tool very well to
select options that retrieved data,
including:
– Type of Trade (exports, imports, trade
balance) – requiring multiple selection
– Reporting Country / countries – multiple
selection
– Commercial partners – multiple selection
for countries, geographic regions and blocs
– Years or quarters
– Totals or by products
– Etc.
• The more options selected the harder it
became to read the results.
• Latency was high, sometimes just for
setting the selection criteria.
Report-based Workflow: Tedious, slow, error-prone, Excel charting
3. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 3
• Poor Performance: Selecting Exports, Imports and Trade balance for Brazil with all countries by
all years and calculating totals by country takes close to 40 seconds to get results.
• Opaque Reports: Results shown in a huge table. The user needs to scroll horizontally and
vertically to review the data.
• Tedious: To change the country the user needs to run a new query and again wait for the results.
• Analytics must be done in Excel or similar tool.
Results: Tabular data where it’s hard to obtain insights
4. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 4
• Analyzed the data sets and use cases.
• Developed more than one prototype using open source technology to
demonstrate options in an agile way.
• Analyzed the underlying database technology; in this case, it was 3 SQL Server
databases.
• Built a data warehouse and ETL process to assemble the requisite data and
make it readily read-accessible.
• Built web services to serve up the data for the front end
• Optimized download strategy for large data sets
• Refined Visualization tools to handle scale and other artifacts inherent in the
data.
Visualization Solution
5. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 5
• The Visualization is the interface.
– Map shows data based on user’s context. For example, if the user is located in Peru,
the visualization presents data for Peru.
– To change the country of interest, the user clicks on the map or selects the country
from drop list that’s part of the Map’s title.
• Product section uses a familiar drop list paradigm.
• Moving the slider for the “Year” shows results in real time.
• Above the slider, a Sparkline shows the historical trends of the transaction.
• Tooltips over countries display the transaction value with that country and the
rate of change from the previous year.
• Users can get the most relevant trade partners of the country at a glance.
• Transitions are animated to allow users to understand what changes are taking
place on the data.
• Loading all data takes just a few seconds. Changing a country, transition type or
year shows results in without delay.
Map Visualization Workflow
9. ConfidentialLooi Consulting 9
• Former process required:
– Manually creating entering queries to generate tabular data
– Exporting data to Excel
– Charting and sorting
• Despite all this effort, still not easy to see insights hidden in the data.
• Daunting for new or non-expert users.
• LCL designed and built a Visualization that was modern, fun to use, with a
natural, intuitive UI and easily discoverable features.
• We designed and built the backend and carefully tuned the web service API to
support the bandwidth needs.
Conclusion
