Make your data tell a story!
The Data Warehousing Institute newsletter dated August 21, 2012 contained an interview with me by Linda Briggs titled “Make your data tell a story”.
Here’s the first question and answer. For the complete interview, go here.
Question: With more tools at our disposal for analyzing, charting, and displaying data, are visual presentations getting better?
Jonathan Koomey: That’s a tough question. Let me first narrow the scope to “visual display of quantitative information” (which also happens to be the title of Edward Tufte’s first and most famous book). I can’t really speak knowledgeably about presentations that include video or other fancy stuff, so I’ll focus on what I know.
Anecdotally, I have noticed few improvements in the general state of graphical display. I still see people using the default graphs in Excel, for example, even though those continue to be problematic. What Tufte calls “chart junk” is still more the rule than the exception, and abominations (such as bar charts with a superfluous third dimension that conveys no information) continue to be widely used.
My friend Stephen Few (author of Show Me the Numbers and Now You See It) recently gave me his view on progress in this area. There are some vendors, such as Tableau and Spotfire, that have studied graphical display and are helping users to do it more effectively, but many more still allow (and even encourage) the same appalling practices that have bedeviled this field for years. The difference is that companies pushing the state of the art understand what Steve calls “the science of data visualization.” The others don’t. The skills needed to build a big data warehouse aren’t the same as those needed for effective display of quantitative information, but too many vendors act as if they are, and don’t yet incorporate into their products what we now know about doing it right.
The key to improving the general practice of graphical display is for the vendors to retool their software to reflect the latest knowledge in this area. Once that happens, things should improve quickly, but I’ve been surprised by how long it has taken for the industry to take these ideas seriously. Tufte published his book Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1981, and Show Me the Numbers came out in 2004. It’s long past time for the insights of Tufte and Few to make their way into all of the most widely used business intelligence tools.
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