IR Widget: Heat Map

An effective tool for visualizing complex data and making analysis easier, enhancing communication of findings, and aiding decision-making by comparing participant responses visually.

Table of Contents:

• Summary
• Purpose
• Setup

Summary

A Heat Map is a powerful visualization tool that employs color gradients to compare participant responses across different questions, categories, or time periods. Its objective is to offer a quick and clear visual overview of intricate data sets, allowing viewers to identify patterns, trends, and outliers. Here are several key purposes and advantages of using a Heat Map for comparing participant responses in survey reports:

Purpose

Highlighting Response Patterns

• Visual Summary: Offers a quick, intuitive overview of the distribution of responses, making it easy to spot overall patterns across the data set.
• Identifying Trends: Helps in identifying trends or commonalities in participant responses, such as areas of high agreement or consistent preferences.

Enhancing Data Analysis

• Comparative Analysis: Facilitates the comparison of responses across different groups, questions, or time periods, showcasing differences in sentiment or opinion intensity.
• Spotting Outliers: The color gradients can highlight anomalies or outliers in the data, drawing attention to unexpected or unusual response patterns.

Improving Usability and Engagement

• User-Friendly: Heat Maps are accessible to a broad audience, requiring no advanced statistical knowledge to understand the basic insights being presented.
• Engaging Presentation: Using colors makes the report more visually appealing and engaging, encouraging deeper interaction with the data.

Supporting Decision Making

• Prioritization: By visually emphasizing areas of high intensity (positive or negative), heat maps can help organizations prioritize areas for action or further investigation.
• Strategic Insights: The visual patterns can reveal strategic insights into customer behavior, preferences, and satisfaction, informing business strategies and decisions.

Streamlining Communication

• Efficient Communication: Heat Maps can condense large amounts of survey data into a single, comprehensible image, making it easier to communicate findings to stakeholders.
• Data Storytelling: They provide a compelling way to tell a story with data, highlighting key points and supporting narrative conclusions with visual evidence.

Setup

1) To set up the heat map, click the control panel icon to open the chart control panel.

2) Once the control panel opens, add a title and subtitle to the chart. Titles can be relevant to the survey section the chart is reporting on.

3) Select the data points to display. Data points consist of various components such as the company, department, participant, reference data, and benchmark options. 

4) Select the data point to which all others will be compared. This dropdown list will contain the options selected in step 3.

5) Select objects to display. Objects consist of the outcomes, intentions, and questions the survey comprises.

6) Configure the data correlation properties and heat map color coding.

Our example, as seen in the Data Correlation Settings screenshot –labeled 6– below

• The color will remain white when your results are within five points of the selected comparator.
• The color will turn warm (yellow/orange/red) when your results are five or more points below the comparator.
• The color will turn cool (light to dark green) when your score is five or more points above the comparator.
• The darker the shade, the larger the difference from the comparator. The thresholds and color variations are shown below:

7) Choose additional display options.

8) Save your settings so they reflect in the chart.