slidedocs

In my workshops, we often discuss the challenge that arises when the communication you're creating is meant to be both 1) projected or handed out in a live presentation, as well as 2) sent as a follow up for those who attended to refer back to, or to fill in those who weren't able to attend the presentation. In an ideal world, these would be two separate work products. In reality, however, this often gives rise to what Nancy Duarte calls the slideument, a single document that is meant to address both needs.

The problem, of course, is that by trying to meet too many needs at once, the slideument doesn't address any of them perfectly. If you're interested in my further pontification on the topic and some thoughts on how to address the challenges that arise with the slideument, you check out this blog post.

My interest was piqued when I saw that Nancy Duarte recently introduced a new concept for using slides, which she has termed Slidedocs. The description on her site describes slidedocs as "a visual document, developed in presentation software, that is intended to be read and referenced instead of projected." The FastCo Design article written about Duarte's slidedocs is titled "Book Written Entirely in Power Point Aims to Reinvent How Businesses Communicate" (article).

With my busy schedule this week, I haven't had a chance to give the 150 page doc more than a cursory review. But rather than wait until I have more time to consume and reflect before sharing, I figured I'd post this now and gather your inputs. What do you think? Will this revolutionize the way we communicate? Leave a comment with your thoughts. I'll add mine once I have a chance to look more closely at the detail.

HelpMeViz

We've all created a graph before and thought: Does this work? My advice when this situation arises is to seek feedback. Find a colleague or friend and show them your visual; have them talk out loud about what they see, where they pay attention, what questions they have. Their comments will help you understand whether the visual you've created is doing what you hoped it would, or in the case where it isn't, provide insight into where to concentrate your iterations.

A screenshot of the landing page at HelpMeViz.

Jon Schwabish has brought this critical feedback loop online, with his recently launched site, HelpMeViz, which was designed to "facilitate discussion, debate, and collaboration from the data visualization community." Anyone can post a visual they'd like feedback on, or an idea to help others who have submitted content (and note that anyone really means anyone: the site is not intended exclusively for data viz experts, but rather anyone who wants to receive or provide feedback). In addition to work-in-progress, the project is also open to published projects, so if you've completed work and want to see a sort of post-hoc on how others might have approached it, HelpMeViz can facilitate that as well.

I love the concept, and it's great to click through the submissions that have been posted so far, as well as read the dialogue they have inspired through reader comments. In some cases, HelpMeViz is also prompting full makeovers, such as the one published on Peltier Tech Blog this morning (link).

Congrats to my friend Jon Schwabish for providing this platform (and thank you for the many hours you've devoted to get it to where it is!). I'm excited to continue to watch it grow and read and participate in the dialogue.

To you, Reader, HelpMeViz is an incredible resource that I hope you will leverage!

slopegraph template

I've found myself increasingly using slopegraphs as of late. They can be useful when you have two time periods of data and want to quickly see increases/decreases between the two periods (example below; see second half of this post for more discussion and another example).

From a formatting standpoint, however, they are annoying. They take a lot of time to set up because basically everything is different from graphing application defaults. I realized as I was making a recent one that I make the exact same changes every single time and may actually leverage a template for this (I say "may actually" because I thought that would be the case once before, but it didn't happen, though I've heard from others that they do use it).

In case you find yourself wanting to use a slopegraph (or quickly see whether one will work given the specifics of your data), you can download the Excel template I created here (screenshot below).

evaluating word clouds

Word clouds created a bit of buzz when they first became popular a couple of years ago (or at least that's when I encountered them for the first time). Like the infographic, they have a bit of sex appeal that draws you in. As in the case of infographics, however, I often find that upon further evaluation they tend to be a letdown - full of fluff without so much informative value.

While facilitating a workshop recently, I heard a horror story about someone who had tried to create a word cloud by hand (perhaps the scariest part of the story involved scaling text boxes one at a time). Lesson: in data viz (and in life), if you find yourself doing something tedious and repetitive like that, stop to reevaluate. At minimum, do a Google search. Even better if you can find a blog post or related article on the topic from someone who has encountered the same challenge before and identified an eloquent solution.

In the case of word clouds, there are a number of applications you can use to generate them. Wordle is a popular free product (created by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM, note that if you upload your Wordle to the gallery, the data goes with it, though you can also opt for local-only word cloud generation) that allows for quite a bit of customization of color, size, font, etc. Google docs has a word cloud gadget within spreadsheets. There are a number of others, easily located via a Google search.

But before you start thinking about generating word clouds, let's continue our discussion on their efficacy. Their sexiness can draw you in. But is there value beyond that? I think it comes down to the use case. I've got one example for the negative and one for the affirmative.

Poor use of word clouds
First, let's take a look at an example from a Community Health Center. My understanding is that they employed a consultant to analyze some survey data from their clients. The consultant put together a report filled with pretty word clouds like this one:

Good service is... minutes? Part of the challenge in this case is that the connotation has been completely stripped away from the nouns, removing the sentiment behind the comments. Which is kind of the important part of the comments, in my opinion. But in reading the report, buried near the end of it, I found the following:

The consultants took the time to content-code the comments. These categories and their descriptions are much more useful for understanding what people value than the word cloud. With this info, we can direct action: we get an understanding of what's going well that we want to maintain, as well as potential areas for improvement. We could take this a step further of making the data visual like this:

In this case, I think the simple bar chart is much more useful (in terms of both understanding the information and determining how to act on it) than the word cloud. Now let's look at a better use of word clouds.

Thoughtful use of word clouds

Caveat: this example came to me by way of the telephone game (I heard it from someone who heard it from someone), which means it's guaranteed that I don't have the details totally right. But I think this still serves well as an example of a good use of word clouds. The story goes: Apple stores obviously really value customer service. They use surveys to collect info about each store. Each day, they create a word cloud for each store based on customer comments. What they are looking for are 5 (I'm making that number up, I don't know what the real number is) specific words - things that are considered must-haves when it comes to customer service in their stores. It's when these [5] words don't show up prominently on the word cloud for a given store that a red flag is raised and some sort of action is taken.

This is what I would consider a thoughtful and actionable use of word clouds. If the required word doesn't appear, some sort of intervention happens.

We can generalize this to the following: when you're considering using a word cloud, think about what you want your audience to know and what you want your audience to do. Then ask yourself if a word cloud will enable them to know and do those things.

And for goodness sake, if you do use a word cloud - leverage some of the tools that exist - don't try to create it by hand!

no more excuses for bad simple charts: here's a template

If you're using Excel to try to tell a story with data, plotting the data in this application should be the first step in your data visualization process, not your last. It takes time, iterations, and sometimes some brute force to get from the graphing application's defaults to a visual that you're proud to present.

I've often given others the advice to create a template in Excel that has some of the obvious things done and use that as a starting point instead of starting from scratch each time. But to be honest, I've never followed this advice myself. Even though I think I probably should. There are those little things that I do every single time I use Excel: change the colors, remove the gridlines, move around and de-emphasize the axis labels, and so forth. None of these steps alone take much time, but when you put them all together and figure that I do them for every graph I make...this all sums up to a big time save to start from a place that is different than Excel's defaults.

So, to try to finally follow my own advice, I've put together a long overdue template with some sample graphs that you can find here (screenshot below if you want to get a sneak peak prior to downloading). Perhaps in addition to eliminating some of my personal Excel time-suck, this will help alleviate some pain for you as well? (Note: I created this in Excel for Mac 2011, but am hopeful the formatting will come across on a PC as well.) Give it a try and let me know what you think!

how to do it in Excel

One common piece of feedback I get after presenting on the topic of data visualization goes something like this: Wow, that was super useful. I'm never going to use pie charts again. But when it comes to the graphs, how do you actually make them look like that? I'm not Excel-savvy...help!

Pretty much everything I do is in Excel. I like to refer to it as "brute-force" Excel, because in many cases the graphing application doesn't make it so straightforward to get from plotting the data to the final product. So I thought I'd take a few minutes to walk step by step through an example to expose those who question their Excel expertise to some of my tricks.

The following example may look familiar; it's from the FlowingData Challenge earlier this year (original blog post here).

The full Excel file can be downloaded here.

What you require most to get from Excel's original graph to the one you actually are proud to present is patience and time. You'll improve your odds of success by leaving ample time for the visualization step: don't rush this important piece, as it's what your audience sees of all your hard work!

visual.ly is live

A few months ago, I came across the visual.ly site, which at that point was a temporary landing page with a lot of sexy looking graphics where you could input your email to be notified when the full site launches. I received that notification this morning, and it's certainly creating a lot of buzz: I've had a number of friends and colleagues forward me the announcement and ask for a review. 

Visual.ly says it is the world's largest community for exploring, sharing, creating, and promoting data visualizations. I have mixed feelings so far based on the detail I've perused. It seems like describing the graphics there as "data visualizations" might be somewhat of a misnomer; perhaps "information graphics" would be a better description? A number of the visuals I've looked at contained no data at all (example).

One thing the images do seem to mostly have in common is their visual bling - they look exciting at first glance due in many cases to color and complexity. I worry about this, as sexy can be good for grabbing an audience's attention, but to maintain it, the visual needs to be clear and straightforward: I'm not sure all of the content there meets the mark on this latter piece. If it works as it appears is planned, this should self-correct over time, with popular visuals rising to the top and vice versa through the wisdom of crowds. I just hope the crowd is wise enough to value utility over sexy.

There are some stellar graphics there for sure. I've included a few of my most and least favorites from what I've looked at so far at the bottom of this post.

There seem to be some technical difficulties (I've had a lot of instances of pages timing out, visuals not loading, and buttons not following through on what they claim they will do for me), but expect that these are painpoints that the crew at visual.ly is actively working to fix.

I'm interested to see whether this site will take off. Take a look. Leave a comment with your thoughts!


cole's faves (based on what I've looked at so far):

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going to give cole nightmares (notice a theme?):

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visualize your LinkedIn network

LinkedIn launched what I consider to be a very cool addition to their site last week: the ability to visualize your network. They call the tool InMaps, and once you log in and hit go, it cycles through your connections to build a striking visual. Each node represents a connection (mousing over will tell you who each is, or clicking on one will highlight their connections within your network). The bigger the node, the more connected the person is. Contacts are clustered into groups and color coded based on their associations with one another.

Let's see it in action - here is my network:

From Storytelling with Data

My network is divided into four main clusters (two of which are closely related). In blue are my Google colleagues. Pink represents my connections from business school (go Huskies!). The green and orange intersecting clusters at the bottom represent my contacts from Washington Mutual. I worked in a number of different roles when I was there, and by looking at the names it appears LinkedIn has grouped two of the main ones: the first (green) are connections I made while managing home equity fraud, and orange represents those made from my earlier various roles in credit risk management. It makes sense that this network is the largest - I worked there longer than I have anywhere else and was working there when LinkedIn was created and first started to become popular.

Want to see your network? Follow this link. See what insights you can draw. And if we aren't already connected, send me an invite!

simple vs. sexy

When it comes to shoes (women's shoes, at least), there are use cases for each. Is the same true for visual displays of information?

My bias (in visuals, if not in shoes) is for simplicity: simple graphics are typically easier to understand and draw insight from. Glitz in infographics is a turnoff for me; it often adds clutter without informative value, making it harder to understand what to pay attention to.

That being said - is there a use case for the sexy infographic?

To explore this question, I decided to test out Circos, an application for "circular visualization". The software was originally created to visualize genomic data, but is now being advertised more generally and has been featured a number of times in the New York Times and other media. When I initially looked at it several months ago, I wrote it off, not immediately seeing scenarios where it would be useful.

But then a couple weeks ago, I was thinking about visualizing a matrix: movement into, out of, and between certain groups. I sketched a few diagrams as I was brainstorming ways to look at it visually. I had a concept drawn out that I thought would work, but was a little unsure how to bring it to fruition with the programs I typically use (most often, Excel). So I started looking through my list of tool resources. When I came to the Circos site, I knew this would be the perfect situation to try it out.

Here's the scenario:

At the company where I work, lateral job transfers are frequent. Transferring to another team or department is a way for an individual to learn new skills and broaden their experience. One interesting thing to understand is how individuals move throughout the organization: in what relative volumes, what areas are net importers or exporters of talent, etc.

One way we can see and understand this movement is in a matrix. Below is an example of what this could look like. (Note: the data shown here are artificial.)

From Storytelling with Data

You can read across a row to see transfer activity out of a given group, or down a column to see transfer activity into a given group. Note the operative word: read. People read tables. You have to spend quite a bit of time looking at the numbers to start to draw insights. They don't jump out at you visually, the way they do in pictures (graphs).

Granted, there are some things I could do to add visual cues to this table to make those insights easier to draw. I could turn it into a sort of heatmap through use of color, drawing more attention to where the large volumes are coming and going. Or I could embed summary graphs of aggregate movement in and out to give a visual of relative magnitudes.

But rather than make minor changes to this simple visual, I want to explore the other end of the spectrum: sexy.

Here is what the same data looks like, plotted with the Circos Table Viewer:

From Storytelling with Data

It is a little overwhelming at first. But after taking a bit of time to orient myself to what I was looking at, I found the visual insights started coming quite quickly. By far the highest transfer volume is coming from and going to groups A and B. It's also quickly clear that groups A and B are both net exporters of talent (more people transfer out than transfer in), and you can follow the lines to see where people are coming from and going to. The visual allows you to look for anomalies and the unexpected. Maybe I'm a big dork, but the visual exploration is sort of fun - certainly more fun that it was in the initial matrix.

Earlier today, I found myself observing an unplanned test with this visual. I was at a 2-day offsite, and the topic of internal mobility came up. I fetched the version of this based on real data and showed it to a couple people during one of our breaks. I subsequently put the piece of paper with the visual on it in front of me on the table. Over the next hour, everyone within reach grabbed it at one point and spent several minutes focused on it. You could visually see on each person's face the cross-over from curiosity to scrutiny to understanding and the discovery of a visual insight.

I'm not sure the same would have happened if the paper had shown the initial matrix on it.

Rather, my guess is the table of numbers would have remained untouched. (I'm totally tempted to try this to see whether it holds true, and plan to do so at the first opportunity). I think the reason people picked up the paper was because the visual was different. It is confusing, but visually appealing in a way that grabs your attention and ignites a desire to understand what, exactly, this complicated looking thing is trying to convey.

In summary, if this test is any indication, I believe I've landed on two solid use cases for the sexy graphical display:

1. To reveal new insight: The clearest use case to me is if your visual allows for a better understanding of what's going on than a simpler graphic will.
2. To grab attention: Sexy graphics can garner attention in a way that a simple or more standard visual may not. Note that grabbing attention alone isn't enough - the visual needs to be able to also hold the audience's attention long enough for them to figure out how to read it, or won't be successful at revealing new insight. Walk your audience through what they are looking at to make the visual more accessible.

Are there other situations where sexy graphics win over simple?