At major milestones in our projects, we find it useful to perform a retrospective analysis on various aspects of the project. This analysis gives us time to identify things that worked well along with the things that didn’t work so well (and everything in between). Once we have obtained feedback from everyone involved in the project, we try to learn from it. Now, there are many effective ways to analyze the data, but I have found that one of the most fun and visually appealing techniques is in the word cloud.
In short, word clouds are illustrations that give prominence to the most common words in a given set of data. At the very least, the word cloud can help you quickly determine the words that are hot topics (good or bad).
Below you will see a word cloud we created from one of our past retrospectives:
This particular word cloud was generated using Wordle.net. Admittedly, this technique probably won’t give you all of the information you need in a full analysis, but it can be useful in presentations or in conjunction with more detailed analyses.
What are your favorite techniques for visualizing data? Have you found one technique that saves you lots of time? Please feel free to post your thoughts!
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