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,…
We have experimented with different styles and formats for reporting research results over the years, including traditional report decks, animated PowerPoint, infographics, headline reports, whitepapers, and live (sometimes video-recorded) presentations. But we have never quite taken the step of creating a video report as the primary presentation of research findings. A client just did it…
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…
Every year I review and suggest summer classes that researchers might consider to learn all the newest techniques for research design and analysis. But for researchers who work in corporate settings, many of those classes are not practical. Who has the luxury of hanging out in Ann Arbor for six weeks to brush up on…
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…
It seems that every time we write or speak about market research infographics, people pay attention. Leading up the Fall 2017 Corporate Researchers Conference, the Insights Association asked for a preview article of our presentation on infographics for its weekly newsletter. It ended up being at the top of the Association’s list of most-read articles…
Yesterday I was delighted to share the stage with Kate Morris at the Corporate Researchers Conference in Chicago, talking about the power, the potential, and the “how-to” of spectacular infographics for market research. Kate spent many years in the research group at Fidelity Investments, and it was for Kate that Versta Research first tried its…
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,…