As market researchers pay more and more attention to the need for compelling data visualizations, Hans Rosling’s work with interactive data is becoming a catalyst for a fascinating new type of data visualization: animated statistical graphs. He uses them to show world social and economic trends over time, and the effect is exceptionally powerful. Here…
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:
As we begin the New Year 2013 (and as Versta Research enters its fifth year in business!) my colleagues and I are thinking less about the hottest trends that dazzle, and more about a few rock-solid resolutions for the market research industry that would make research more valuable, relevant, and useful compared to last year,…
An extremely useful chart rarely used by market research professionals is a mekko chart, sometimes referred to as a marimekko chart. It is a stacked bar chart, but (1) the width of the bars varies in a meaningful way and (2) they are lined up next to each other. Usually the bars vary in width…
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…