The New York Times Magazine runs a weekly feature called “Who Made That?” It provides a history on the origins of oddities like fly swatters, soy-sauce dispensers, clothespins, Kraft Singles, and … pie charts. They attribute it to one William Playfair, a Scottish engineer who created and published a pie chart in 1801. He is…
I’m always inspired by this video from Vi Hart, who describes herself as a “mathemusician.” She doodles and draws, finds numeric patterns and insights as she does it, and weaves interesting (and funny) stories around those insights.
The New York Times is one of the few organizations trying to push our industry further in developing better data presentation and visualization techniques. Sometimes they do a good job, introducing rich, informative, engaging, and interactive charts that would make even Edward Tufte, the contemporary pioneer in data visualization, proud. Sometimes they do a not-so-good…
How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time? In R. That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis. It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of…
We came across these images in a series of humorous montages that professionals had created about what they do. This one was created by Jason Sullivan.
We came across this chart from Invisible Children, the group that produced the Kony 2012 video. It shows the organization’s expenditures by category. It is a poorly designed chart for three reasons: 1. The pieces of the doughnut are not correctly proportional. For some reason, the arc widths were compressed for some categories (like Media…
Coincidentally in the same week that Versta Research published its winter newsletter on Turning Data into Stories: A How-To Guide, last week’s AMA event in Chicago was a market research panel focused on telling stories with data. The presentations were solid, with lots of helpful ideas. But there was also a misguided idea working its…
Given how common mapping capabilities have become via the Internet and smartphones, it is surprising that we don’t see more geographic mapping in market research. Researchers nearly always look at customer demographics, and a key component of a person’s demographic profile is where he or she lives. This data is far more compelling if you…
Over the last few years we have wondered whether spreadsheet software like Excel will soon make statistics software like SPSS or SAS obsolete. Spreadsheets have amazingly powerful and often intuitive capabilities. They have many of the statistical functions we use every day. Younger people entering our profession rarely know programs like SPSS or SAS, and…
MaxDiff is a survey method used to measure the importance of product features. Subsets of features are presented, and respondents are asked to select which feature is most important and which feature is least important. Its advantage over other techniques is that by forcing a choice from among multiple features, it more strongly differentiates the…