From the monthly archives:
Do you want to know how the unemployment rate sounds like? Copy this string:
65536,32768,16384,16384,16384,4096,
4096,2048,1024,1024,256,128,64,16,4,2
and paste it into here (right-click, past).
Now the Dow Jones Index:
2,4,4,2,2,32,32,16,64,1024,2048,4096,
16384,65536,32768,16384
All together now:
65538,32772,16388,16386,16386,
4128,4128,2064,1088,1024,2304,
4224,16448,65552,32772,16386
This is fun.
(Big gloomy smile.)
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I have a confession to make: my past is paved with chart-making sins, including some capital ones (yes, 3D pie charts, too). But years ago I saw the light in Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Some time after that first revelation, I stumbled on Stephen Few’s Show Me the Numbers
Or should I say one and a half?
Edward Tufte and Stephen Few are often cited together, as if they were a single entity. For many of us, simple mortals, Stephen Few is some kind of translator of God’s voice. Given Few’s background, that wouldn’t be completely inappropriate…
For some time that’s how I looked at Few’s work on charts and data visualization. But I was wrong. They do share similar views about basic data visualization principles. And they seem to share the same level of stubbornness, too. But there is a major difference.
Tufte is an artist. His data visualization principles derive from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalism, and in that sense, he approaches charts from an aesthetic point of view. His charts are as beautiful as a chart can be, if you happen to like the aesthetic minimalism.
I don’t know how and when Few became aware of the need for better data visualization. But he embraced Tufte’s principles not because he is an aesthete like Tufte, but because he values efficiency and those principles happen to improve it.
Stephen Few would never title a book “Beautiful Evidence”. He doesn’t mind to use Excel to create his chart examples, while Tufte needs full control of details like kerning (and he uses a designer’s tool, Adobe’s Illustrator).
On the other hand, Tufte would never write a book about dashboards (Beautiful Dashboards? brrrr…). From an actionable, business visualization point of view, Tufte is The Visual Display… Almost everything else is beautiful, yes, and perfect for the coffee table.
And while Tufte escaped Flatland for good, Few still keeps both feet firmly on the ground, discussing BI tools, pie charts or irregular time series (and I don’t think his new book
Both approaches are very consistent and they give you a set of guidelines that you can apply to all your charts and adopt as a general framework.
What I am not comfortable with is their positivist attitude, specially in Few. Because Tufte’s charts are aesthetically pleasing, we can derive some emotion from that. In Few’s case, his charts are purely functional.
I still don’t know where to draw the line between purely rational/functional visualizations and the eye-candy. Let’s see this pattern:
Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.
Do you feel emotionally overwhelmed? No? Do you even care about the story? Do you even care about the boy and the girl? Let’s try again:
John fell in love with Anna the moment she spilled coffee on his shirt.
This sounds much more interesting. Add three more sentences and you’ll complete the boy-meets-girl pattern. Both versions share the same pattern, but the second one adds some (perhaps irrelevant) detail and creates an emotional link between the audience and the characters.
You need that in data visualization, too. You don’t have to cry because you chart shows a market share drop in Alaska, but you must connect with the reality behind the chart and the data.
Jacques Bertin says that knowledge is built by the user when interacting with the chart. Why interaction (and animation) is absent from Tufte’s and Few’s books is something I don’t really understand.
Although I respect Tufte and Few, I feel that there are pieces missing in their theories. We can borrow some pieces from Bertin’s work (and Tukey’s?) and that will surely help, but the real issue here is to find the balance between the need to correctly (bureaucratically?) display the data and the emotional response that helps to keep the audience interested.
Back to you, a very simple question: what are Tufte and/or few missing? What pieces do we need for a XXI century visualization?
Photo credits: ~L. and David Zellaby.
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In a recent article for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, writes:
“The banking industry that emerged from that collapse [the Great Depression] was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far less lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partly because bankers were so conservative about lending (…).Strange to say, this era of boring banking was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.”
Now that history is repeating itself, I believe that this applies to data visualization too. The 3D pie chart with pseudo-realistic textures, charting tools like Dundas, Crystal Xcelsius and Excel 2007′s charting engine, they all share the same spirit of the times that nurtured the sub-prime lending mess and all that followed. The spirit of the times that rewards illusory short-term results and effectively dismisses consistent, well-founded, long term strategies.
We may be scared of the future, but are we scared enough? Krugman again:
“Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress. Can they be persuaded otherwise? Will we find the will to pursue serious financial reform? If not, the current crisis won’t be a one-time event; it will be the shape of things to come.”
Many business managers still associate fancy charts with serious decision-supporting tools. This is the right time to change. Eye-candy, “professional looking” charts are sub-prime charts, and if you take them seriously, they’ll do to your business what sub-prime lending is doing to the world economy.
Good charts are invisible. If your audience’s first comments go to your chart format and design, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. Get back to your charting tool and create a new chart. Do it as many times as necessary. The audience must see and comment the data patterns only, not the chart.
Charts don’t have to be boring. ”If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers” says Tufte. If you need your daily adrenaline shot, get it from the insights a good chart provides, not from the chart design.
What do you think? Is this crisis creating a serious “back to the basics” spirit that will influence the way organizations optimize their resources, including the time they spend creating useless charts and presentations?
Photo credit: Steve Kay
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Some years ago, as part of my (then) new job, I had to maintain a monthly updated Excel dashboard. It was a maintenance hell, I hated it, but I couldn’t change it because of my poor Excel skills.
“This is stupid, there must be a better way”, I kept saying to myself.
So, I searched, and searched, and searched, and within a few months I became the most skillful Excel user in my company and I could solve my initial problem. An all day long update turned into a ten minute task. I revamped the entire dashboard, but I kept the same user interface.
Back then, I was able to use some of the more common formulas, like most Excel users do. But if you want to create Excel dashboards you must understand how everything fits and works together. If you don’t, expect nothing less than a spreadsheet hell. You should never underestimate that.
I hate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and I avoid them like the plague. If I suspect that a co-worker, after asking for a report, will come back and ask for different scenarios, I usually offer that functionality from the start. It’s a win-win situation: it doesn’t take longer than a static report, I avoid extra work and the user loves to play with his/her new toy. 
As I said, I kept the same user interface in that dashboard. It proved to be a huge mistake, from a personal marketing/career perspective. After all these years, I still believe I made a remarkable job but, because I kept all the changes behind the scenes, they went unnoticed by the users — including the boss. Well, marketing and promotion is a big step out of my comfort zone, and office politics is not exactly what I do best…
That old dashboard was created by an above-average Excel user, but he failed to understand this basic concept: an Excel dashboard is a jigsaw puzzle, and fewer pieces makes it simpler to solve (for example, a simple pivot table can often replace dozens of formulas).
Go beyond the individual formulas. Create a project that forces you to learn how they work together (that’s what my dashboard tutorial is all about).
And never make your outstanding job invisible, use your Excel skills to work less but try to make sure that too much Excel will not harm your career…
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