Collecting data is easy

Presenting data is easy

Presenting data so people enjoy the experience is hard

I’ve started searching for examples for presenting data that:

• Make the implications of the data intuitive
• Are easy to grasp quickly
• Make the data presentation interactive and/or dynamic
• Show multiple dimensions without creating a visual mess

ESPN.com’s Game Flow shows the scoring progress of two basketball teams over the course of the game. This chart can give you a flavor of the game (e.g. tightly contested, blow-out, back and forth) in a way that the final score or a box score cannot.

Ben Fry is an expert at visualizing data from complex systems and data sets. Here’s a visualization tool he created to “see” zip codes:

We’ve been learning how to show data in ways that allow us to identify patterns of customer behavior. Here is an example of a student proceeding through an online science course. Looking at a few hundred of these pictures allows you to identify recurring patterns.

Image © Juice Analytics

Next time you have to present a large and potentially boring wad of data to a business audience, consider creative ways to move beyond bar graphs and pie charts.

For someone immersed in the world of business analytics, there are a host of relevant concepts in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink . The latest section I read was entitled: “When Less is More.” We’ve had a couple of blog posts along this line (Less data, more insight and Too much data, too little focus). As usual, the professional author offers a few delectable ways to appreciate this concept…

• He provides a great example in Cook County hospital’s ER where a simple algorithm proved more effective in diagnosing patients suffering from heart attacks than doctors grasping for all available data inputs. “The extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issue.”

• He finds that more information can create a false sense of security. In a study of psychologists, Gladwell quotes research Stuart Oskamp: “As they received more information, their certainty about their own decisions became entirely out of proportion to the actual correctness of those decisions.” Decision-makers are nearly as desparate for confidence in their decisions as they are in making the right decision. As a result, they desire the pile o’ data as a safety net.

• Gladwell also emphasizes the need for frugality in using data. Identifying the important patterns in data only becomes harder as you add more levels of information. “To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.”

It is very satisfying to see that Mr. Gladwell has finally came around to my line of thinking.