Stephen Few left a comment in my post “Is Data Visualization Useful? You’ll Have to Prove it“. We all have much to learn with Steve, so instead of leaving the discussion buried in an old post, I thought it would be interesting to make it more visible. Please read the comment then come here and … Read more
Making a chart is so simple that even a chimpanzee can be trained to do it – press F11 and get the banana (that would explain the poor quality of many business charts and presentations – and the raising banana consumption). To prove that they are better than chimpanzees at making charts, humans invented the … Read more
Can a picture of a nude person improve your decision-making processes? (Please don’t say “yeaaaaah”.) Probably not, but if you need a good attention grabber a picture of a naked b0dy is your best bet. Make sure you’ll add one to your next sales report. Because, if you are using those glossy 3D pie charts … Read more
According to Stephen Few, the founders of Tableau Software made some assumptions about visual analytics’ adoption that we can summarize in a single sentence: analysts want to find hidden insights in large and complex data sets using new visual paradigms. Later on, they discovered that these assumptions were somewhat flawed, and that what people really … Read more
Many misconceptions plague the field on information visualization. This post lists some of them and tells you how to remove those misconceptions.
One of the reasons why information visualization in business is so poor is because many managers are clueless about it. They really believe that a simple training course on Office tools is more than enough to create some nice 3D charts for a Powerpoint presentation (and they are right: that’s all they need, because that’s … Read more
A chart is just one of the available tools to communicate and help you and your audience to understand the data; sometimes using a chart is just plain wrong: if variation seems random or non-existent, what’s the point of displaying the data graphically (yes, I know, sometimes that’s what you want to show)? So, take … Read more
Yes, I know about the Malofiej awards and the Society for News Design. Yes, I know that there are many many designers out there that really care about the data and use their skills to communicate effectively, sometimes with awesome results. Sacrificing data on the altar of Beauty But for many many more, data is … Read more