November 28, 2018

Thank you to everyone that joined our first Chart Chat Live webinar.

In addition to the recording above, you can also download Steve’s slides here and download Jeff’s slides here.

Recap

After brief introductions, Steve discussed color and the use of BANs. Steve discussed “Lonely Numbers” as discussed in the new book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling.

Figure 1 — Factfulness by Hans Rosling

He enjoyed the book so much, he’s read it twice!

Steve also added BANs to the Churn dashboard from Chapter 24. This updated dashboard can be downloaded from www.BigBookOfDashboards.com/dashboards.html.

Steve also encouraged viewers to review Adam McCann’s blog post on 20 ways to visualize KPIs.

Jeff discussed some examples of “Comparing Individual Performance with Peers” from Chapter 3 of The Big Book of Dashboards. This dashboard is available for download here.

Steve discussed “visualization we shouldn’t like, but do” and showed Jeff’s Name Dropping visualization and redesign with the “fun removed”.

Steve also showed a beautifully-designed health care visualization by Katie McCurdy from Pictal Health.

Figure 2 — Patient history dashboard by Katie McCurdy.

Jeff closed the webinar with a discussion about “The Screaming Cat” and discussed various blog posts related to radar charts, dual-metric donut charts, and the various responses from within the data visualization community.

Use radar charts to compare dimensions over several metrics by Jonathan Trajkovic

Dual-Metric Donut Chart Tutorial by Toan Hoang

Radial Bar Chart Tutorial by Toan Hoang

Jeff discussed how these tutorials can be useful in real-world cases, even though they may not be best practices in other cases.

The highlight of this section was Jeff telling the story of the famous Florence Nightingale Rose Chart, how it was tremendously effective in delivering a very important message at the time. Jeff also took on the daunting task of redesigning this very famous visualization.

Figure 3 — Original “rose” graphic

 

Figure 4 — Jeff’s redesign.

[Note from Steve: Jeff’s redesign is terrific.]

Additional References

Better than Jitter Plot by Steve Wexler

In the pursuit of diversity in data visualization. Jittering data to access details by Danieal Zvinca

Speaking of Graphics (2006), An Essay on Graphicacy in Science, Technology and Business by Paul J. Lewi, Chapter 5, Florence Nightingale and Polar Area Diagrams

Florence Nightingale’s Hockey Stick, The Real Message of her Rose Diagram, by Hugh Small

Next Installment

Be sure to register here for the next installment of Chart Chat on January 8th, 2019 at 11am.

We hope you find this information useful.

Jeff and Steve

www.BigBookOfDashboards.com

 

Follow Jeff on Twitter at @HighVizAbility

Follow Steve on Twitter at @vizBizWiz and sign up for his newsletter here.