Most managers don’t care about a better visualization of business data. As a reader puts it:
Short of locking management in a room with Tufte and Few, how do I sell management on the value of seeing things differently?
Instead of trying to sell, let’s see why the aren’t buying. Here are some reasons.
Good Charts Are For Middle-Management
Making sense of a large amount of data is a task for the middle management, while senior management only needs a couple of carefully chosen KPI.
I suspect that some middle managers secretly use good dashboards, dynamic charts, the works. If they are doing a good job, their reports for the senior management are filtering out all the less relevant data and now they can focus on what is important: making a good impression. That’s why middle managers use charts for illustration purposes only, and PowerPoint (low resolution, animation effects, 3D and textures) is theperfect tool.
This is also why top managers don’t really care about charts. They like to see some color in a report, but little knowledge (or none at all) derives from the charts. Each new 3D chart reinforces their perception that charts are pretty but fundamentally useless in the decision-making process.
This is a gross simplification, naturally. I just want to emphasize that:
impression management should be taken into account when discussing real-world business visualization;
upper managers need less (but more focused/filtered) data than middle managers;
upper management can hardly evaluate the role of charts because they don’t use them in their decision making processes.
I strongly believe that interaction is a critical feature when creating charts and dashboards, but top management needs answers, not tools to explore the data. When designing an executive dashboard you must know who will use it, and how. Middle managers will be please to know that they can select different competitors from a list, but top managers want you to tell them who the competition is. Corolary: know your users.
Show me the Numbers
A piece of advise: display a label like “12,893,239.873″ on the top of a column in a column chart and your managers will sleep much better. To you, it may seem a useless precision. To them, it brings a priceless sense of security and “being in control”. Tip: try to find the optimal rounding digit that makes your manager look more relaxed (extra points is he/she starts to levitate).
Seriously, a chart is not a table, and it shouldn’t be treated as one (this is one of many misconceptions about charts). But you can display the exact value of some relevant data points, provided it doesn’t interfere with the patterns. If that’s not possible, add a table below the chart or, better yet, link the chart to the underlying table. With a little VBA you can use a “mouse over” event in PowerPoint to show/hide the table.
Iliterate Inertia
Let’s face it: most people are unaware of our little knowledge field of information visualization. They don’t learn about it in school, they have a bad addiction to the wrong role models (the media), they are exposed on a daily basis to ugly and stupid defaults (in Excel and PowerPoint) and corporate culture isn’t helpful. Neither inertia.
So, do you have a better answer? Please share it in the comments.
I know a lot of you don’t like bubbles in your viz, but this one works for me.
Jon Peltier, in the comments, argues that:
Sets of bars would have been more effective.
Tim adds the definitive argument:
“Always using bar charts is like always using missionary position. It might be more practical, but it gets boring!”
OK, let’s see. I have nothing against bubbles, there is a good level of interaction, and the chart looks clean and professional.
And yet, something is missing. I like interactive charts, but I’m lazy. I love a chart that shares a story with me and invites me to touch and manipulate and find more and more. When you open this chart there is nothing interesting to see, and if you force it to speak, well, it just… bubbles.
Tim’s comment is fun, but not very accurate. I will not detail my own preferences regarding positions but, unlike data visualization, getting the job done quickly by maximizing efficiency is not exactly my number one priority.
You can/should be creative, but at some point you must decide if you want to know how far down the rabbit hole goes. If not, it’s just inconsequential foreplay. Nice, but not enough.
I humbly accept our business visualization reality: 90% of all business charts are created in Excel and most business users are unwilling to learn yet another application and go through all sorts of hassles (data management, compatibility issues, file sharing) just because a different product offers a bigger chart gallery and some obscure defaults no one cares about (except the experts).
You don’t take driving lessons in a Ferrari, specially if you don’t know the difference between a Ferrari and a Fiat. Why would you want Tableau or Spotfire if all you want and need is a pie chart?
If we want to make users more curious about the way they use their data, if we want to persuade them that 3D charts are useless, if we want them to adopt what we believe to be information visualization best practices, we must start with the application the users are familiar with.
It would be great to have a better tool in every computer, but we don’t have it. What we can do is to undermine it from inside, by educating the users and showing them how mediocre the tool is.
If done right, this should be visible in market surveys, sooner or later. And Microsoft will react to that, hopefully. There is no other way.
Leaving the Excel Flatland
That said, we can agree that Excel’s chart gallery is notoriously poor, defaults and options a nightmare, and the implementation of advanced visualization techniques a pain in the ass. And while you can argue that most new chart formats are outperformed by traditional ones (and a large majority is) you cannot assume that the plain ol’ bar chart will be here forever. We are using XVIII century visualization tools to display XXI century data. Things change very slowly indeed.
We cannot understand information visualization if our worldview is framed by the Excel chart gallery. Yes, we can recreate in Excel some formats that we see in other applications, but something is always lost in translation. Like in this song:
Brilha, brilha lá no céu
a estrelinha que nasceu.
You may know it as:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
how I wonder what you are.
The music is the same, but the user experience is much different (specially if the user doesn’t know Portuguese…).
R
Kelly O’Day over at ProcessTrends if offering the Learn R Toolkit, target at Excel users. I’ve just bought it. Why?
Because I like the idea;
Because I’m curious about creating charts using a programming language;
Because it’s not easy to create this in Excel, no matter how hard Jon tries .
Now, let me be frank. I don’t believe that regular Excel users would want to use R. If recording simple macros are outside their comfort zone, an application that requires programming even to create a basic chart is clearly out of limits.
R seems to require a lot of programming to create more advanced charts. Surely you can create a bar chart with three lines of code, but that’s the equivalent of
print "Hello World!"
Not very useful, but I’m sure Kelly’s Toolkit will encourage me to explore and break some handcuffs.
I don’t want to write a blog about Excel charts. I just want to write about making sense of business data. The tool shouldn’t matter (but it does).
Most managers don’t care about a better visualization of business data. As a reader puts it:
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