Or How I stopped worrying and learned to love appreciate the Marimekko March 19, 2017 Overview Readers of my blog know that I suffer from what Maarten Lambrechts calls xenographphobia, the fear of unusual graphics. I’ll encounter a chart type that I’ve not seen before, purse my lips, and think (smugly) that there is undoubtedly [...]
February 22, 2017 Overview Earlier this week Gartner, Inc. published its “Magic Quadrant” report on Business Intelligence and Analytics (congratulations to Tableau for being cited as a leader for the fifth year in a row). Coincidentally, this report came on the heels of one of my clients needing to create a scatterplot where there were [...]
Overview Prior to working with Jeffrey Shaffer and Andy Cotgreave on the The Big Book of Dashboards I tended to look at BANs -- large, occasionally overstuffed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) -- as ornamental rather than informational. I thought they just took up space on a dashboard without adding much analysis. I’ve changed my mind [...]
February 10, 2017 I was greatly saddened earlier this week when I read that Hans Rosling had died. Rosling was a Swedish professor of Global Health who, using data, stunning visualizations, and incredible charm, changed the way people understand the world. I first became aware of his work six years ago when a friend showed [...]
By Steve Wexler January 17, 2017 This is a follow-up to the post Jeff Shaffer and I wrote about what can happen when people fail to question sources and inadvertently amplify baseless findings. Overview There’s been great feedback on things the community can do to maintain all the good things about Makeover Monday (MM) and [...]
By Steve Wexler and Jeffrey Shaffer January 9, 2017 Please also see follow-up post. Overview Makeover Monday, started by Andy Kriebel in 2009 and turned into a weekly social data project by Kriebel and Andy Cotgreave in 2016, is now one of the biggest community endeavors in data visualization. By the end of 2016 there were over 3,000 [...]
Overview So, you’ve created a wonderful collection of survey data dashboards that have innumerable demographic filters so that users can, for example, just see responses from left-handed Los Angeles Lakers fans between the ages of 34 and 39. So, what’s the problem? Actually, there are two problems. The first occurs when extreme filtering reduces the [...]
Overview Imagine a terrific introductory college course presented by a terrific professor. That’s the feeling I had in reading The Truthful Art, Alberto Cairo’s follow up to his first book The Functional Art. Whereas his first book took a “look at what you can and should do” approach to help people see and understand data, [...]
Overview As readers of this blog know, I have my problems with donut charts. That said, I acknowledge that they can be cool and, under certain circumstances, enormously useful. On a recent flight I was struck by how much I liked the animated “estimated time to arrival” donut chart that appeared on my personal TV [...]
Overview My obsession with finding the best way to visualize data will often infiltrate my dreams. In my slumbers I find myself dragging Tableau pills in an ongoing pursuit to come up with the ideal dashboard that shines light on whatever data set has invaded my psyche. But is the pursuit of the perfect dashboard [...]
