Category: Visualization
-
Waterfall charts, pareto analysis and beyond
Waterfall Charts? Do you like pies? I do! But not for analyzing data. Pie charts are just too busy and too hard to read in most situations. Yet they are the frequent tool of choice for visualizing the composition of a certain variable. Take a look at this example: I want to find out how…
-
Scatter charts – Good for relationships
SCATTER CHARTS – THE BASIC IDEA One of the interesting and really fun things to watch is young kids learning about cause and effect. They pull on a string and music starts playing. They giggle. They push a car and the car begins to roll. And so we learn to be curious at an early…
-
What cartoons can teach us about information delivery
A picture says more than a thousand words, right? Managers drown in pages of numeric reports. But as John Medina, author of the famous book ‘Brain Rules’ clearly pointed out: “Vision trumps all other senses“. In other words: we are much better at absorbing information through visuals than we are at reading numbers and letters.…
-
Why bubble charts are cool
Things can be complex. Especially when we look at multi-dimensional data-sets. The objective of charts is to visualize data in the most effective and easy way. You shouldn’t need a PH.D. degree to decipher a complex chart. But it happens. There are a lot of complicated and useless charts out in dashboards. And it happens…
-
Why sparklines sparkle in a dashboard
SPARKLINES SPARKLE One of the key features of the dashboard in any car is the fact that it is on a ‘single page’. Car dashboards are usually very simple and it doesn’t take us more than a few seconds to familiarize ourselves in a new vehicle. Could you imagine driving a car with a complicated…
-
Hands-up! Here comes a bullet chart
Executives often want to have a quick overview of some key metrics to find out what the state of their business is. Questions like: Are my margins on target? Is customer satisfaction within an acceptable range? What is the size of my pipeline? All this information is typically summarized in a dashboard. The easy thing…
-
Charts? Yes, I know….
Dashboarding….Part 2. Yes, we do know that we shouldn’t eat those chips. Yes, we do know that we should read more books. Yes, we know that we shouldn’t drink that much coffee. But…..BUT…..We all know that there are small things we can do that could really have a big impact on our life or job.…
-
What photography taught me about dashboards
Photography and dashboards? Huh? Fire and Ice? Photography is a big and important hobby of mine. And it is a tough hobby. There is a lot to learn and the opportunity to make mistakes (read: create photographs that really suck) is huge. It starts with understanding your camera, deciphering basics like Aperture, Shutter Speed and…
-
Visualization of unstructured information
The other day, I attended a great exhibit that was put together by my friend Bernhard Lermann (@lermann) and his companion Jens Semjan. Their Munich exhibit called “The Eternal Timeline Show” is highly unusual, very entertaining and informative. Apart from educating me on a few things, the exhibit certainly triggered a lot of thinking around data…
-
The power of Data visualization
We all know that visual information display is more effective. But yet, we still create, run & analyze hundreds of thousands of flat reports. A survey from 2007 (CFO Executive Board) found that the average management report is 30-40 pages long and that it contains 12000 to 15000 data points. But only 5% of those…