Normally when I hear the term process flow, I die a little inside. It just strikes me as management jargon—a big pet peeve of mine.

Still, there are times in which the term flow just makes sense—and not just on Six Feet Under.

Case in point: Sankey diagrams. Creating them is very simple with this tool and the case studies in The Visual Organization contain a few examples.

I grabbed the salaries of the 2017-2018 Cleveland Cavaliers from Basketball Reference:

Evidently, J.R. Smith’s salary doesn’t guarantee that he pays attention to the game’s score. (Couldn’t resist.)

Sure, I could have used a simple bar or line graph above. As I tell analytics capstone students, though, playing with new dataviz applications, tools, charts, datasources, and techniques is just plain fun. This mind-set is a major part of my teaching philosophy.

Marillion Studio Albums by Decade

I noodled around with SankeyMATIC and it’s fairly straightforward. Here’s a dataviz of Marillion’s remarkably consistent stream of albums by decade. I put my favorites of each decade in red. (Let the debate begin.)

If I were taking my analytics class as a college senior, then I’d go much deeper here.

For a much better example when this type of diagram makes sense, consider how where one Reddit user slept during over the past six months:

In case you are wondering, you can do the same thing in Tableau. Click here for a Sankey template.

Simon Says: Use new and interesting methods such as Sankey diagrams to represent data.

I can’t say it any better than Dr. Seuss: