Wednesday, June 18, 2014

How to Scale Y-Axis for ZOOMS Trends

There are several improvements with ZOOMS 2.1 and the first difference you'll notice is the trend controls... the buttons at the bottom of each trend that "control" what happens to the trend.

For this post, we'll be focusing on the Y-axis scaling buttons, which are 5 o'clock position when looking at the trend from straight on.  There are 3 buttons:
  • multi
  • channel
  • single

Multi

By default, every trend is plotted as "multi," which is an abbreviation for multiple Y-axis.  Each trace on the trend gets its own Y-axis scale where the bottom is the minimum value and the top is the maximum value:

While you get a fuller sense of each trace - since each trace spans the entire range of the graph, there is no sense of what the traces are like in absolute value.

Single

The left-most button is "single," which refers to plotting all the traces on a single Y-axis. Using this method, you can get a strong sense for how the traces relate to each other.
Compared to the multiple Y-axis, we can now tell that the orange sinusoid is oscillates in a lower range than either of the red or magenta traces.

Channel

The channel Y-axis scaling divides up the trend in N horizontal slices and plots each trace in its own channel.  Using this method, you can hover your cursor over the entire trend and get a feel for what the values actually are.


There are plenty of awesome web-trending applications that give you more precise control over the actual scaling of the Y-axis, and we think they serve the tactical employees (e.g. operators and engineers) well.

The Zymergi implementation of Y-axis scaling is geared towards the time-crunched strategic users like managers and directors.

See also:

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