from points to poignant

I love a good makeover challenge. I received the following graph in response to my call for visuals ahead of my visit to a Midwest retailer last month to run a session on data visualization. It should be noted that the creator was not submitting this as a graphical standard, but rather was looking for advice on how to better show the data in a way that would make sense. (Note: I've changed the data and generalized the series names so as not to give away any sensitive information.)

BEFORE:

From Storytelling with Data

Behind this data is a scorecard. The data in this scorecard is used to calculate the weighted performance index by category across the given business (let's call it Our Business) and 5 competitors. I would assume the goal of the visual, then, is to show how Our Business stacks up against the competition to highlight relative strengths and areas for concern.

The graphic above does that, but not in an easy-to-read way. To make sense of the data, the reader has to basically read each column of data points. It's very difficult to see the relative performance of Our Business across the different categories, especially since sometimes our series marker is totally obscured behind other data. There must be a better way.

The following shows my attempt at a revamp.

AFTER:

From Storytelling with Data

One thing that was really challenging about the original dataset is that the weighted performance index was on a range from -1.5 to +1.5, which means when you plot it, you have data going in two directions. The first thing I did was to change the scale such that it would range from +0 to +3. In this case, the actual number is less important than the relative ranking, so I got rid of the numbers altogether and show the relative difference between Our Business and the various competitors visually.

In the above, you get two visual comparisons easily: 1) you can focus on just the blue bars to see how Our Business is doing across the various categories on a relative basis and 2) within a given category, it's easy to see how Our Business is doing relative to the competition. I decided to show this both through the horizontal bars, as well as by labeling the rank of Our Business relative to the competition in each category for a quick summary stat.

Labeling the rank directly meant that I could leave the competition in the same order in the subsequent bars, so I wouldn't have to complicate the deciphering of the visual by making each a different color (which would both complicate the interpretation of the graphic and make Our Business stand out less) and could just label the relative order once in the legend on the left.

Leave a comment to let me know what you think!

the joy of stats

The Joy of Stats has been on my to watch list for a couple of weeks. It's a 60-minute program with Hans Rosling, an animated and passionate Swedish global health professor, founder of Gapminder, and one of my favorite data storytellers.

In the segment, Rosling shares his obsession with stats. It includes clips from some of his lectures and TED talks. The stats overview was fairly basic (averages, variance, distributions, correlations), but the hour was entertaining and fact-filled. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Crimespotting by Stamen Design for showing the relationship between topography and crime: it's making citizens more powerful by arming them with information so they can hold officials more accountable.
• Florence Nightingale's polar area graph for showing the magnitude of deaths from preventable diseases contracted in the hospital, which led to a revolution in hospital hygiene.
• David McCandless' Billion Pound-O-Gram for understanding the relative sizes of the really big numbers reported by the news and government.
• Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar's We Feel Fine project (an "exploration of human emotion on a global scale") for uncovering trends in how people are feeling.

Though I found it a little overly glitzy at points, Hans Rosling was entertaining as always and I found myself glued to my computer throughout to see what he would do or talk about next.

If you haven't seen Rosling in action before, or want to get a better sense of what to expect, check out the following short clip from the program:

Why are these sessions so good? In addition to the creative use of data visuals to support his claims, Rosling's enthusiasm as he tells stories with data is both entertaining and contagious. Makes you wish you had visuals in real space, right? (Ok, that part might have been a little over the top.)

Side note: my personal opinion is that motion graphics (like the bubble charts used in many of the talks, which can be created via a gadget in Google Spreadsheets known as Motion Charts) need to have somebody there to talk through them and help the audience understand what to pay attention to for them to be effective. Hans Rosling is masterful at this.

"If the story in the numbers is told by a beautiful and clever image, then everyone understands." - Hans Rosling, The Joy of Stats

a new year's resolution: declutter your graphics

Happy 2011! One popular new year's resolution is to declutter: declutter your closet, declutter your life. I'd like you to consider decluttering of a different variety: declutter your data visuals.

Last month, I visited a Midwest retailer to run a workshop on communicating effectively with data. Leading up to the session, I asked participants to send me data visualizations on which they would like feedback. I decided I'd take it a step further from just providing feedback and do visual makeovers on a few of the submissions.

As I was revamping the graphs, I relished in the fun of teasing a story out of data. It never ceases to amaze me how relatively minor changes can take a visual from a mess of data to a clear message that pops. In this post, I'll walk you through one such transformation. (Note: I've changed the data so as not to give away any sensitive information.)

BEFORE:

The intent of the graphic (discerned from the slide title, which is omitted above) is that, while spending less on clothing and using coupons more both have net increases over the time period considered, shopping sales more often is relatively flat at end of period compared to beginning of period. This is highlighted directly on the graphic via the red circles at the beginning and end points.

It takes a bit of time and patience to tease this story out with the above graphic. That's due to a couple of reasons:

1. The sheer distance between the series and the legend means you have to refer back and forth a couple of times to understand what you're looking at and which series is which (the different colored shapes on the black lines aren't immediately visually very different from each other, which doesn't help).
2. There are a lot of distractions that you have to sift to in order to figure out what's important to pay attention to. The background shading, gridlines, and borders don't add any informative value. But visually, they are as strong as the data, which means we have to take everything in to establish an order of priority in which to consider the information, because this isn't done visually for us.

Below is my remake, graphing the same data.

AFTER:

From Storytelling with Data

First, I changed the series colors to be strikingly visually different from one another. I eliminated the markers for the individual data points, which added unnecessary clutter. I left markers for only the beginning and end points (and labeled those directly, removing the y-axis altogether), since the story the author seemed to be trying to tell focused on those.

I eliminated the background shading, gridlines, and borders. Not only did these not add informative value in the original visual, but they actually make the data stand out less. If we want our data to tell the story, we need to make it stand out the most. In the resulting visual, there are few things competing for our attention, so we can relatively quickly and with little effort start to see what can be learned from the information that is being presented.

Note: One thing you don't get from my madeover version is a clear indication of the magnitude of the points in the middle of the graph (though you can get some sense of this from the relative positioning of the labels on either end). If this were important (I don't believe that it is here), you could add very thin, light horizontal gridlines at multiples of 10's to help make that more explicit.

Often, it is minor changes that will help you take a visual from good to great. Decluttering is a great place to start improving the effectiveness of your graphics. Ask yourself: does this need to be here? Is it adding any informative value? If the answer is no, then take it out!

Leave a comment to let me know what you think. Stay tuned for more makeovers!