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How To Read A Heat Map
Heat maps represent information from databases and spreadsheets visually as rectangles,
with important characteristics of individual data items used to determine the size, color
and layout of the rectangles. In general:
Size
maps to relevance, such as the size of an
opportunity or the total budget for a project. Color
maps to urgency; like the potential upside of an
opportunity, the cost or time overrun on a project,
risk levels, or the number of security incidents at
a network site. Grouping
of rectangles is tied to category information, such
as department, manager, location, or type of product
or application.
When these three visual cues are combined in a heat map,
it becomes straightforward to:
Identify which information is the most important,
for example, the opportunities or threats that involve
the largest financial impact, since the associated
rectangle or group of rectangles is large. See urgent issues such as
particularly high risks or overruns, since the
associated rectangles have a color that stands out from
other data. Discover trends or interesting patterns,
such as generally higher or lower performance or risk
associated with a particular region, manager, type of
product, etc., since grouping related records together
spatially allows detailed data represented by size or
color to be seen in context.
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