Data Visualization Is Not the Silver Bullet You Hoped For
It is magical thinking to believe that charts and graphs and fancy new tools for data visualization will solve the challenge of finding insights in data.
It is magical thinking to believe that charts and graphs and fancy new tools for data visualization will solve the challenge of finding insights in data.
Like most researchers who take data visualization seriously, I am not a fan of pie charts. But yesterday I came across a pair of pie charts that display data in a striking and visually compelling way. Indeed, they tell a story with data better than other alternative types of charts. The story here is obvious,…
Falling in love with PowerPoint is not hard. It just takes some practice, and a wee bit of interest in learning some basic principles of design. You can gain fluency in PowerPoint entirely on your own—no training classes needed. And once fluent, you will understand it gives you abilities to create beautiful research reports even…
For every dozen people who hate using PowerPoint, there is a weird person who loves it. That weird person is me. PowerPoint has surprisingly strong capabilities for charts and for displaying research data. All it takes to create beautiful and powerful research reports in PowerPoint is: (1) getting familiar with its functionality, a lot of…
Surveys don’t get much simpler than this. It is from the New York Times, which I typically admire for its rigorous reporting, thoughtful analysis, and forward-thinking experimentation with data visualization. But even with such simplicity, this survey (published on April 22, 2018) manages to be terrible in at least three big ways: It asks a…
One memorable lesson from reading Edward Tufte’s books about visual displays of quantitative information is that charts are not the only way to display data. Indeed, they are sometimes a worse way. We should always at least consider a table as a superior alternative: Tables are clearly the best way to show exact numerical values,…
Data wonks have more fun than you may think. If you have not yet begun working with the R statistical program (which is mesmerizing, extremely powerful, hard to learn, but weirdly intuitive, and FREE) then here is a fun and relatively easy way to give it a test drive. It is becoming a tradition that,…
The R statistical package is an amazingly powerful and versatile tool for data analysis and data visualization. When it comes to graphics and charts, here is one reason: It has foundational plotting tools that can be adapted in infinitely many ways to create (and invent) many more types of charts than you will find in…
Sometimes data visualization is too compelling for it’s own good. People are impressed by the beautiful design, and they look right past the utter nonsense being presented. This is “beautifully” illustrated by Google’s rollout of the first of many new features of their survey tool. Here’s the email they sent: We’re excited to announce that…
This week we built a chart that dazzled the research and design team we are working for. It’s called a Sankey chart. In the context of market research, it is used to show the “flow” of respondents from one cut of data into another. For example, suppose you have data on how respondents started shopping…