Steve Wexler Wins the Iron Viz Championship

At the 2011 Tableau Customer Conference, Alex Kerin, David Newman and Steve Wexler, the winners of our three visualization contests this year, met to compete with each other and answer the ultimate question: whose viz will reign supreme? Their battle has finished and Steve Wexler of Data Revelations has taken home the title of Iron Vizzer, $2,000 and an iPad. Congrats!

The contest itself was quite simple: each contestant had an identical dataset (Initial Public Offering data) and 20 minutes to create the finest visual story in the room. At the conclusion of the 20 minutes, our panel of judges chose the winner. As you can see below, the contestants each had a gigantic projection screen of their own so the audience could view their progress side by side.

As the contest ensued, Alex, David and Steve scrambled to assemble a visualization that was both beautiful and useful. Cheryl Phillips of the Seattle Times, as well as Tableau's own Jock Mackinlay and Elissa Fink judged the contest... quite seriously as you can see. Each contestants work was evaluated on a 100 point scale, with 20 points possible for the amount of Twitter traffic they received, 20 points for aesthetics, 30 points for visual best practices and 30 points for the strength of their story.

It turned out that all of the contestants were within 10 points of one another but Steve Wexler ended up just ahead of Alex and David. Alex's viz was a focused (and beautiful) tool for deciphering the best time to invest in IPOs. Davids' viz took a top down look at the origin and classification of IPOs. Steve's winning viz showed how Wall Street insiders are perhaps the only beneficiaries of initial IPO pops. His was the simplest of the bunch, but his winning description and straightforward story won over the judges and the audience.

Thanks to all of our contestants and everyone who stopped by to view the contest at the Conference. Remember to look out for our visualization contests next year... you could win a trip to TCC 2012 and a chance at the title of Iron Vizzer!