It’s our job to deliver bad news as well as good news, right? To tell clients what they’re doing wrong so they can fix their problems and leap to the next level of profitability, right? Why would they spend money collecting data if they just wanted to hear how much customers love them? In fact,…
If you have ever done “clicker training” with a dog, you know how amazingly effective positive rewards are in training, versus the old-fashioned method of “correction” and negative feedback. Identify and reward the behavior you want, and you can teach an old dog new tricks within hours. It works for people too, which is why…
This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “How to Design an Excellent Chart.” It addresses one critical piece of turning research data into compelling stories by focusing on the process of data visualization. For us, that process involves five steps:
I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny. Maybe I’m just not cynical enough (ha! my friends are laughing already!) But I can’t think of any managers or clients for whom I’ve worked that are like the pointy-haired boss in this episode. I have never been asked to provide tons of data that look so…
I recently saw a press release about a study showing that only 19.5% of news release headlines are optimized for SEO. It brought to mind all kinds of issues about how best to report numbers in press releases. In particular it highlighted the important issue of whether specific numbers are meaningful and whether they communicate…
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…
If you want to write a great research report, do not write about the data, and do not write about the research itself. Write about what the data prove, because that is what your clients and managers really care about. Versta Research has just published its How-To Guide on Turning Data into Stories. It outlines…