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Usability Sciences specializes in user experience research. Founded in 1988, the company helps a diverse range of clients develop seamless experiences for their customers. And since its analysts began using Tableau, they’ve been gaining insights into online user experiences more quickly than ever before. We talked to Rebecca Ratliff, Director of Operations at Usability Sciences. In this video, she explains how Tableau helps Usability Sciences zoom in on the tiny details that cause visitors to leave a website.

As a major marketing company, Merkle is used to handling data from all kinds of sources. And with a number of big-name clients in multiple industries—including Dell, MTV, Susan G. Komen, and Bank of America—the marketing giant is regularly using Tableau with myriad data sources. “It’s actually spreading like wildfire across our entire organization,” says Senior Business Intelligence Analyst David Andrade about Tableau. In this interview, he explains why Merkle uses Tableau for both internal projects and client-facing communications.

For nearly 30 years, International Game Technology (IGT) has been designing and manufacturing computerized gaming equipment for clients around the world. Lon O’Donnell, IGT’s manager of professional services, knows the data-driven science behind casino gaming. In this interview, he explains how IGT is using Tableau to optimize slot machine features in ways that were previously unimaginable. “A single slot machine spits out six to ten fields per hour multiplied by a thousand machines multiplied by 24 hours, multiplied by 365 days,” O’Donnell emphasizes. “So you're looking at about a billion fields per year that a single casino will analyze.”

We love data visualisation competitions. Inspired by Facebook and Emily Kund's efforts, Mike Evans has created VizWars, a data visualisation event in Irvine, California, on February 11th. We recommend you go along and join him for VW1!

Welcome to the final 2013 Best of Tableau Web, looking back at December's blogging content. For those of you who aren't yet blogging, I hope they inspire you to start.

Working with Survey data is notoriously tricky. Different answer types, especially Likert scales, as well as free-form answers make the data dense. Now try to cut it by demographics and it gets even harder. For those reasons, many people who collect survey data fail to get the understanding of it that they hoped for. A new whitepaper by Steve Wexler offers a path to insight.

Allergan, a multi-specialty healthcare company with operations around the globe, employs more than 11,000 people worldwide. Joe Madigan is the Director of Customer Services in the EMEA region—Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With so much ground to cover, he’s got a lot of data. In 2009, each of the 12 customer service sites in the EMEA region was using its own contact center technology—which caused data inefficiencies. In this interview, Madigan explains how his team went from 1 Tableau Desktop license to 20—and how that fostered a healthy environment for data and finances.

A highlight of tips, tricks, and inspiration for Tableau and data visualization.

In this 2nd in a series of posts about the upcoming 8.1 release, I get to introduce one of the most exciting new features in Tableau 8.1: R integration. R has been a very popular language among statisticians but in the past few years, it has become the language of choice for a much broader group of data enthusiasts.

A highlight of tips, tricks, and inspiration for Tableau and data visualization.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the Tableau 8.1 release. With every release we try to provide features that help people answer more questions. Tableau 8.1 is now in beta with a host of new analytical capabilities, from boxplots to one-click percentiles and ranking.

'Easy Empty Extracts' Sounds like a kids' tongue-twister. But it's actually a hot Tableau tip, courtesy of our very own Ryan Stryker, Sr Business Consultant, Tableau Professional Services. Thanks, Ryan! Extracts are not a hard sell; the performance gains we see through the local materialisation of data views are usually staggering. And Tableau Server gives us a handy platform for auto-magically refreshing it all. For large extracts, though, it can be quite time-consuming to create a desktop version before publishing to the server. Understandably, customers often ask if there’s a way to “just have Server do it”. Of course there is.