1. Easy to learn - Easy to use

    Parallel Coordinates is hard on the brain at first, and the available tools, even Spotfire, are still a little immature. Spotfire had some quirks, though it is excellent, much better than I expected for this visualization!

  2. Data import (also cleanup, missing values)

    Data is relatively easy to import from an excel spreadsheet. You can tell SpotFire to open up the spreadsheet, and for the most part it will do the right thing. Except that it seems to import integers as doubles...

  3. Scalability

    That depends. You can show some patterns quickly and easily for a few categories, with many data points. For example, check out this screen shot of Amit Goel's Applet:

    However, showing more than 8 or 10 parallel axes at once is cluttered and confusing unless the pattern is obvious.

  4. Speed - responsiveness

    Just fine, I suppose. My data set wasn't large enough to really tax Spotfire.

  5. Type of data (hierarchy, table, temporal)

    Multi-dimensional vector spaces! Parallel Coordinates can effectively show relationships between coordinates whose scale is different, i.e. logarithmic vs. linear, or 1-10 vs. 1-1000. This is really important. Consider this example: How to lie and mislead with Parallel Coords
    Here we see everything with the same scale. This makes relationships and correlations less obvious, and blurs the ordering of the teams.

  6. Screen space usage

    Just fine.

  7. Match the task?

    Visualizing multi-dimensional vector spaces. Well, to be more specific, you can visualize correlations between 3 or 4 or 5 different categories at the same time.

    Note that this tools handles temporal data very poorly, because it treats time as just another parallel axis. Since time is almost always the X axis in a graph, it is very unintuitive, and probably not helpful, to try to relate time as a parallel axis. I haven't really tried, but I can't imagine it too well.

  8. Range of questions that can be answered

    Hmm. I entered this visualization with a very clear sense of what questions I wanted to visualize and answer, and I did that. I don't know if this is the best method for finding abstract relationships you didn't know about or weren't looking for.

  9. How generic is it?

    Not very, because parallel coordinates are weird.

  10. First impression (Whaoo factor)

    Oh, I live this idea. It's cool!

  11. Target audience

  12. Advanced capabilities - complex concept

    Hmm.

  13. Exporting capabilities

    Doesn't preserve axis labels! Dammit!

  14. Stability - consistency - continuity

    I'm not sure.

  15. Integration / Multiple visualization

    Spotfire can visualize the same data in N different formats. Excellent for that sort of thing!