Juice Analytics

Is the Score or the Rainbow More Memorable?

A cool afternoon rain was the only thing damper than the spirits of the 12-year-olds who shuffled off the field. With the score still lit up on the wooden scoreboard, the coaches yelled to the boys as they struggled to lift their heads so they might catch a glimpse of a rainbow as it rose from the fence in front of them.

The players of both the winning and losing teams stood there on the wet, steamy grass, frozen in place, in awe of the sight of a rainbow that mystically appeared as if painted on the sky just for them to see. For them, it was an atta boy, pat on the back, a perfect way to wrap up a hard fought double header in which the score had not quite represented the effort that the losing team had given, where the stats failed to tell the tale that brought these two teams together on the hallowed Cooperstown soil.

That’s the thing about numbers. When left to their own devices, they can feel as cold as digits on a lonely scoreboard. They say nothing of the teams who trained for months, played together game after game, relinquished their Saturdays and played nearly perfect seasons just to get to the tournament.

Numbers alone tell us nothing of context. When we have something particularly meaningful to say, images help us share it best. Dashboards and data visualizations bring to life presentations in which we can engage in two-way conversations with our audience making the story around our data more memorable, impactful and effective than any spreadsheet or table of numbers we can put in front of them.

What will your audience remember? The numbers, the final score? Share visually, and they will remember the rainbow and the sunshine that most certainly will follow.

Special thanks to Peter Bielan, my significant other, for inspiring this blog by sharing this photo that he shot during his son’s baseball team pilgrimage to Cooperstown, NY this week.  

We’re teaming up with O’Reilly Media to challenge you to participate in a data visualization contest leading up to O’Reilly’s Strata New York Summit September 19 – 23.

Data has become nearly as essential as food in both our personal and professional lives. So, why not use food as the basis for a data visualization contest?

Play With Your Food.

Join in the competition and visualize information about all the delicious fare our society enjoys. (First, you’ll want to put down that chicken wing, lest you get sauce on your keypad.) Being the foodie you are, you’ll appreciate that we’ve found some pretty cool data sets from FoodFacts.com for you to play with, making this subject matter you can really, uh, sink your teeth into.

A Trip to NYC, Strata Conference Passes and More.

The grand prize winner will win a trip to the Big Apple to present their winning visualization at the O’Reilly Strata NY Summit in New York, NY September 20 – 21, 2011.  Other prizes include Strata NY Conference passes, ebooks from oreilly.com and more. Sweet.

On-the-Map Judges.

Who would pass up an opportunity to get the attention of these judges, let alone have their work reviewed by Flowing Data’s Nathan Yau, The New York Time’s Amanda Cox and Juice’s own Chris Gemignani?  Serious bragging rights.

All That.

More information about the challenge categories, the rules, the prizes, the judges, judging criteria and all you could possibly want or need know about the contest is here.

So, get started on your data visualization now, while your appetite is whet for competition. Entries are due by August 28, 2011.

Juice Fans Get 30% Off Strata NY.

Register now to attend the O’Reilly Strata NY Conference, and get 30% off your registration fee with the special Juice fan discount.  Just enter “JUICE” on the conference registration page.  Learn more.

I grew up in a bilingual household where we spoke French and English. Many of us who’ve been exposed to other languages realize that there are some words that just don’t translate well into English.

One of the words that got used often in our family was the French word gourmand.  Its closest translation in English is gluttony, but how often does anybody ever say that word?  Probably the simplest way to think of it is the antithesis of gourmet, or even better, someone who prefers quantity over quality.

While there can sometimes be a negative connotation with the phrase, “Il est gourmand,” (“He is gourmand”), it can also be just a recognition of someone’s preferences.

To this day, even though my French has gotten pretty bad, I still occasionally refer to people as gourmet or gourmand.  It could be when I’m sitting in a restaurant, standing behind them in line at Costco or even hearing about their current data initiative.

What is a data gourmet?

Just like a food gourmet, a data gourmet is someone interested in something distinctive, visually appealing and inspired by results or action taken. It isn’t about hordes of numbers or metrics. It’s about getting the right metrics in place, putting them in the right context and letting them stand out.

Think of the chef who prepares the meal like the one in the picture. He or she not only wants to stimulate your taste buds, but also hopes that their use of color, plating and white space will appeal to you and your visual senses, as well.

What is your data gourmand?

So, as I alluded to earlier, not everyone is a gourmet. Many people value quantity over quality. As it relates to data, someone who is a gourmand is probably unsure of what they really want to do with all the data they are requesting. They figure it best to get as much as they can while they can, especially if they aren’t sure what they will do with it.

Unfortunately, they probably have never been exposed to a really useful dashboard or visualization. Ultimately, what they think will satiate them and potentially their users is as much data as possible. However, the volume of data would net a number of metrics, charts and gauges, etc. that would be more than they could ever consume.

Working with a Data Gourmand

When you find yourself in a situation where you are working with a data gourmand (and you will – it’s just a matter of time), don’t look down your well-trained visualization palate at them.  Instead, gently guide them along a path of visual-epicurean transformation.

Most likely, they’re going to want to load up their dashboard plate with every bit of data junk they can find.  Start by getting them to see their dashboard as a blank palette to meet specific goals vs. an empty pallet to load up everything they don’t need.

As they select different metrics, invest the extra time to train them to carefully select just the right information that provides the balance their data diet needs for a healthy body.  As they make their selections, help them to see that it’s okay to have favorite metrics.  As Amanda Cox of the New York Times says, “Data isn’t like your kids.  You don’t have to pretend to love them equally.”

Finally, if you need some help, refresh your skills with the Juice white paper, “A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use“.

Once you’ve finished, ask yourself these questions.  Does everything in front of your gourmand now have a reason to be there? Did they pause in appreciation or comment that they can’t wait to use it?  If so, you may be well on your way to executive data-chef status.

Have a data gourmand/gourmet story of your own?  We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Juice’s Jon Buffington took center stage at the National Capital Area Google Technology user’s group in the D.C. area recently and busted some fancy moves.  And, you should have seen him once his presentation started.

Taking the group through the process of designing and implementing an interactive data visualization using Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Jon also incorporated DOM, Canvas, SVG, ReST and Scala browser and server technologies to complete the information experience.

GWT is an open source development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications, and is used by many products at Google, including Google Adwords and Orkut.

Armed with a tutorial, Jon compared browser graphical techniques and their respective technologies compatible with GWT. As exhibited in this little gem, Jon simplified the visualization down to a basic bar chart, making the similarities and differences between the technologies amazingly clear. (Yo, Jon.)

Download the presentation, and adopt some formidable moves of your own.

Jon Buffington Shares Insight on Building High Performance Data Visualizations

Jon leads our product development team here at Juice, and crafts ingenious software technology that transforms data into information experiences. You can check out more of his work, specifically, here.

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