The Beginner's Guide To Data Visualization for Mobile Games | Member Blogs - Gamasutra

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Alex Moukas, Founder & CEO of Wappier (www.wappier.com) reports, For all our strengths, humans aren’t very good at bulk data processing. 

For all our strengths, humans aren’t very good at bulk data processing.

Instead, thanks to the power of our optic nerves, we’re much better equipped for symmetry detection and spatial awareness. Data needs to be transformed into something we find visually meaningful before we can draw any actionable inferences. For mobile game developers in particular, this presents a unique challenge. 

With an addressable audience of more than 2.4 billion people, mobile games deal with unparalleled volumes of player data. Thankfully, specialized frameworks have been developed to collect and store this information, but the sheer amount of data makes it uniquely challenging to derive actionable insights. 

This is where data visualization comes in...

Visualizing Engagement

High-level averages can be represented easily enough through simple numerical displays broken down by game version or user segment. Detailed game-specific data sets however, often require more sophisticated visualizations. Anything relating to location data, such as the distribution of defenses in a build & battle mobile strategy title, are often best visualized using heat maps. These are typically two-dimensional charts with localized areas that have been color-coded along a warm-to-cool spectrum in relation to player activity. Designers can utilize heat maps to better optimize user interfaces.
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Source: Gamasutra