(For which, see Ponytail.)

The A/B comparison touches upon a kind of false test that I think is common. I don’t know if there’s a name for it. But:

* Imagine you give someone the choice between A and B. They will choose A even though it’s wrong. BUT, given the choice among 50 charts, A_1 through A_49 look like A. They will choose B, the correct choice.

It’s kind of a Warhol principle but in a good way….

Another story that comes to mind is the chairman of Sony in the late 70′s. Walk-man’s did terribly in focus groups. Probably they were posing a wrong question like, “Could you see yourself using this?” or “Would you recommend this to your friends?” after having some people sit around a conference table and listen to a corporate tape. They didn’t put people in a realistic situation and ask the question, they just … posed the question.

Does that make sense?

Fantastic. I’m working for 13 years in visualization and for about 6 years with actual customers in software visualization (also as co-founder of a softvis tools start-up company). My experience with the real world, stakeholders as I like to call them instead of the overloaded word ‘users’, is precisely what you describe. Simple graphics, and graphics which _motivate_ their audience to do something about them, work best. Scatterplots, treemaps, parallel coordinates didn’t in so many cases I was involved in. I found a striking parallel between the notions of value and non-value in visualization and the notions of value and waste in lean software engineering (see Poppendieck, 2006), reflected so well in the words of so many actual customers who told me/us: “OK, nice image; nice tool; how much can this save me and/or how much can I gain with it, and what is the price I have to pay for using it?” Sounded like a brutal question first, but I’m afraid they were right. If we cannot quantify the value (and cost) of a technical tool, it’s not a technical tool, but something else. If you’re curious, see http://www.cs.rug.nl/~alext/PAPERS/IEEESW10/paper.pdf

Take care

Stéphane

Although I appreciate your blog, I believe that in an effort to be provocative you sometimes stray from the facts. You have done so in this particular post.

You wrote: “When Stephen Few asks the readers “true stories about the benefits of data visualization” that’s almost an admission of impotence.” Not at all. The effectiveness of data visualization is well established by a large body of empirical evidence. My request for “true stories about the benefits of data visualization” was an attempt to get people to share their real-world successes with others. People have told me many real-world success stories, but I have never bothered to record them, and therefore can never manage to remember them in detail.

You wrote: “If a single chart can save the world, it will not be a Few’s or Tufte’s 100% compliant chart. It will be a glossy Xcelsius pie chart.” Didn’t you mean to say “It will “not” be a glossy Xcelsius pie chart”? Based on your later statement about pie charts, I suspect that you did. I agree that if a single chart could save the world, it certainly doesn’t need to be 100% compliant with the principles that I teach, but you said that “it will not.” You’re being provocative in a way that could backfire on you and any of us who try to help people use data visualization effectively. There are a great many software vendors out there producing really ineffective products that love any opportunity they can get to promote their bad products. They love statements like yours and will take them out of context to serve their own interests in ways that will harm the people who need good data visualization tools.

You ended with the statement: “Draw a line but don’t forget the candies. You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink, unless you give him some sugar cubes.” Horses that are thirsty don’t need to be tempted with candy. Pure water running freshly in a stream is what they want. People that aren’t thirsty might need to be tempted with something sweet, but you don’t give them candy instead of water, you give them candy to get them to then drink the water. You seem to be suggesting something about my work that you’ve suggested in the past–that I oppose charts that are delightful in appearance or interactive. You know better than this. The “eye-candy” and interactivity that I oppose is only that which undermines the objectives of the chart. Beauty and enjoyment need not be at odds with effectiveness. People who create charts that incorporate decoration and motion in ways that undermine meaning, distract from the message, or that make the charts difficult to understand are unskilled designers. Do you believe otherwise?

To your reader PragmaticCynic, who commented above, I’d like to say that you must not be familiar with my work. “Ivy-towered pretentiousness of what is good”? You won’t find any examples of this in my work. If you believe otherwise, I invite you to share them. My work seeks to help people like you who present information to those who have “little time to study a chart.” What I teach is extremely simple and practical. It is designed to “hold their attention” and “make it interesting” in ways that engage them with the data. This is something that, contrary to your claim, I never forget. Anyone who knows my work knows that I don’t teach lofty techniques that are designed for “The Royal Economic Society.” You are mistaken.

And finally, Jorge, you not only failed to correct Pragmatic Cynic’s errors, you actually fueled them by saying that my “approach to information visualization partially fails because people’s emotions are removed from the equation.” I do not discount people’s emotions. I am well aware of them and the ways that they can both enhance and undermine the effectiveness of data visualization. If you believe otherwise, as you suggest, then you should support your claim with concrete examples.