Why do our sports pages look like this?

Instead of this?

Eastern Conference
Atlantic
Nets
76ers
Celtics
Raptors
Knicks
Central
Pistons
Cavaliers
Bucks
Pacers
Bulls
Southeast
Heat
Wizards
Magic
Hawks
Bobcats
Western Conference
Pacific
Suns
Clippers
Lakers
Warriors
Kings
Southwest
Spurs
Mavericks
Grizzlies
Hornets
Rockets
Northwest
Nuggets
Timberwolves
Jazz
SuperSonics
Trail Blazers

Those green and red lines are "sparklines"--a term invented, I believe, by Edward Tufte. They are little, word-size graphics that show a trend more quickly and clearly than one could describe it. In this case, each sparkline shows an NBA's team record throughout the season; a green up bar is a win, and a red down bar is a loss.

In less space than a standard standings listing, we see the sustained excellence of the Pistons, the steadiness of the Spurs and Mavericks, the Raptors recovering from their awful start, the wheels falling off the Pacers, the mystery that is the Nets. These large multiples of small graphics recover some of the romance and drama that is a season.

For a really beautiful example of sparklines applied to sports, look to Tufte's professional example here. If you know Python, Grig Gheorghiu has written a simple tool for generating sparklines.

Here's a link to a half-hour presentation by Lawrence Lessig titled "Is Google Book Search 'Fair Use'?". The topic is important. If you use PowerPoint, it's also valuable to see a very polished alternative.

A while back, I highlighted Dick Hardt's presentation to show that there are alternatives to running through a list of bullet points when you present. Dick's presentation is similar to Lessig's. Some have called Lessig's style the "Lessig method"--keep the slides very, very simple, perhaps a word or two of text or a simple picture, and focus the slides relentlessly on the needs of what you're saying at each moment. It's shown up in some surprising places.

Check out Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen for an overview of the Lessig method, the Godin method, the Kawasaki method, and the Takahashi method. There are alternatives to the Microsoft method.

500 words. That's all I'm giving myself to make my point. Here it is: constraints can be your friend. Limits on time, money, people, resources can channel your creative energy, drive innovation and focus.

The seed: I've been listening to podcasts about entrepreneurship (Venture Voice, Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders), and hearing a recurring thread: company finds itself in a terrible pinch, money is running out, strategic options disappear, employees leave -- suddenly the start-up turns a corner to success. Why would this happen with such frequency?

There's a "Theory of Constraints", originated from the Operations novel (there aren't many of those) "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt. The concept goes:

"In any complex system at any point in time, there is most often only one aspect of that system that is limiting its ability to achieve more of its goal. For that system to attain any significant improvement, that constraint must be identified and the whole system must be managed with it in mind."

Which is to say: constraints limit performance. I'm not so sure, especially in service-based businesses. Absence of constraints can be the problem. Here's why:

• More begets more...confusion, chaos, complexity. You've probably seen the inefficiencies of big teams and the lack of focus of big-company strategies (Microsoft strategy presentation). Lost in the complexity is attention to detail, clarity of mission, an appreciation of the value of resources.

• More options lead to analysis paralysis. Did you know there are six kinds of Snickers now?! I am often too dazzed by my candy bar options to choose. A constraint-less world offers too many options -- and leads to a fear of sub-optimizing. So we fall back on...

• Status quo decisions. When a manager's marketing budget goes up, the tendency is to just increase spend in proven channels -- rather than experimenting with something new. More options pushes us toward our affinity to avoid risk -- at the cost of innovation.

Which isn't to say I won't take more money or more help any day. My concern is about managing the downsides of more:

• More waste
• Less creativity
• Less attention to detail and quality
• Less focus and clarity
• Less pride in accomplishment

Isn't it worth seeking out constraints in some situations -- even if imposed artifically? A few ideas that we are going to try:

• Create artificial deadlines with teeth. Something real and bad has to happen when a project extends beyond a deadline. What if a team had to write a document describing why a deadline was missed?

• Limit design freedom with less space, fewer colors, fewer tabs and buttons. At Juice, we recently found that we had some fairly radical limitations on the space available to create a web interface. What started as an annoyance helped us take some great steps forward.

• Cap team size. What if you limited every team to five or fewer people? Just imagine the efficiencies and focus -- and all the people you could legitimately exclude!

• Try without money. What if you had no marketing budget for a new product? I bet most of the companies that succeed with viral marketing are those that need to. Big companies admire the power of using customers as a salesforce -- but advertising is so much more well understood.

• Fewer words. How about limiting blog posts to 500 words; PowerPoint lists to five items; and proposals to three pages? As Mark Twain said: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one."

There is pain in fitting into constraints. And it isn't always worth it. But there can be pay-offs in innovation, efficiency and focus. (Darn, 618 words. I'm off to my 118 minutes of "Dancing with the Stars".)

Others' thoughts on this subject:

• Paying for Fewer, Acts of Volition Blog

• Less is more, Open Source Analytics Blog
• On the value of constraints, roBlog
• Lack of constraints killed the quality of Star Wars, Signal vs. Noise

My daughter Zoe, three-year-old amateur scientist, was feeling the limitations of her Blues Clues computer game yesterday. Her game has a science segment where kids can explore the planets. Each planet is presented in cartoon form with three flash cards revealing fun facts.

Three facts just get a kid warmed up. Then, she and I get to play the game of infinite why's. It's a good game that anyone can play, young or old.

To satisfy her curiousity and mine, I installed Celestia, "a real-time 3D space simulation featuring a database of over 100000 stars." Anyone who's a fan of Google Earth should check this out. It brings the same feeling of "OMG, I can see everything, I'm omnipotent!" to the rest of the universe. If you haven't tried Google Earth, you need to check it out, not every product offers omnipotence, especially for free.

Here's a sample of Celestia's universal goodness. This is the earth, as seen from ten thousand kilometers behind the moon.

Now let me drag this conversation, kicking and screaming, into the realm of business analytics and why Juice Analytics exists.

The transcendent experience offered by Google Earth and Celestia--each answered question leading smoothly to another question--represents one way of learning about the world. Blues Clues' lineup of planet facts represents another. Both are necessary.

Blues Clues: What's the state of the world as I know it? Goal: condense chaos into a few key facts.

Google Earth: What don't I know about the world? Goal: make a vast amount of data explorable to all, find new things that you never imagined.

The Google Earth perspective is scarcely represented in business analytics. Showing the world's data on a map of the Earth is hard, but showing your organization's data with all its richness may be even harder. Mount Everest will always be there at 27.98055N, 86.93210E. But a business is a slippery thing. Business lines and direction can and must change. Your business' Mount Everest might be in a completely different place tomorrow.

Dealing with change is one problem; another is justifying the value of exploration versus facts. Hard numbers are how you run your business, how you measure success and compensate for that success. How can you define the value in exploration? We've helped clients explore their data and we have always found unexpected customer behaviors that our clients could not have imagined. These are the sorts of things that you can build new business models upon.

Another approach is to spend 15 minutes learning facts about a place (try Scotland). Then spend the same amount of time in Google Earth exploring the same place. Knowing key facts enriches and guides your exploration. But exploring the data opens your mind to new ideas. Imagine if you could do the same thing with your customer data; see it summarized and condensed and explore how customers use your product.

The Google Earth of business analytics doesn't exist today. Visualizing your business and your customers without flattening the richness of individual behavior is difficult, nearly impossible. But we can at least start by recognizing that something is missing.

A few days ago, I came across this interesting blog post concerning how to really get the most out of college. Like Babak, I too am a graduate of Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Being a newbie to blogging and the working world myself, I though I'd start off my first post by sharing a piece of advice I got as an undergrad that makes a lot of sense to me now:

"It's not important that you know the answer, but rather you know where to look to find the answer"

This especially seems to ring true with the current craze of mash-ups and the push for simple web-based solutions. It’s never ceased to amaze me (even in my short time here at Juice) how many times a person completely capable of understanding their data does not realize that they have most of the tools they need right in front of them. Usually, its not about knowing the answer to the question, but knowing where to look to find the tools to answer it yourself. That being said, I don’t know much about jazz guitarists or snakes, so most of my posts will run along the lines of my thoughts on practical methods for data analysis and random thoughts on design issues.

There is a vast yet ignored population out there. No, not the Blue States. I'm talking about people who want to know more, make better decisions, and understand their customers better -- if only they could make sense of their data. These are the analysts in mid-sized companies without big data warehousing platforms to lean on, the small business owners who want to be savvier about their customers' needs, and the executives who are frustrated by how few of their questions can be answered.

Resources for this audience are a little thin. While there are lots of sites and blogs for the "enterprise business intelligence" community and "web analytics", our audience is underserved. I spent a piece of my Sunday (new boy Owen in my lap) making a list of blogs that may be of use. I split them into three categories: 1) general business analytics blogs/sites; 2) Data presentation and visualization; 3) Excel resources.

General business analytics

• Open Source Analytics: Nice personal style and we share some of the same axes to grind.
• Intelligence Economy: This blog offers some nice, in-depth descriptions of companies that are using analytics to their advantage. Also provides summaries of BI reports by companies like Forrester.
• Steve Krause Blog: Written by the VP of Analytic Product, CNET Channel. An interesting read covering a wide range of current topics, including commentary on the use and misuse of data.
• Information on Demand Blogs: A new addition that covers a range of information topics such from technology trends to data services
• Hired Brains knowledge repository: Here is a great group of articles and white papers about business analytics by Neil Raden.
• Jim Novo's Drilling Down: Despite a recent disagreement with Jim, I still think he generally gets what it takes to help businesses make sense of data. His expansive tagline says it all: "Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet, A Guide to Maximizing Customer Marketing ROI." What is particularly valuable: He isn't afraid to share his content freely. This isn't a blog, but he does have a free newsletter.
• Sort's Feed: Here's one I just found -- I like the cut of their jib. "Gain analytical perspective and clear insight from their marketing data."
• BI Toolbox: "Articles about Business Intelligence Resources and How-To's for the professionals"
• Net Intelligence A blog for professionals looking for the next level of competitive advantage. Wide-ranging posts from myths about information to intelligent decision making.
• Business Intelligence Network, David Loshin The BI network has a whole stable of bloggers--I found David's blog the most relevant to the everyday analyst.

Data presentation and visualizatoin

• Presentation Zen: How you present your data can be as important as the analysis. We've written about the skill and art of presentation building. In this blog, Garr Reynolds offers tips, tricks, and examples for making great presentations.
• Information Aesthetics weblog: A daily dose of information visualization to spark your creativity.
• Stephen Few: "Thoughts about how visual representations of data and visual interaction techniques can be used in practical ways to analyze and communicate business information"
• Dash Tracker: "Keeping a watchful eye on the growing field of desktop graphical dashboard applications". Dashboards are an overemphasized piece of a business' analytics picture--particularly if you're in a fast changing environment. Still, this offers a good industry overview, with particular focus on software solutions for building dashboards.
• The Dashboard Spy: "A collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots. This reference work is proudly offered as a source book to everyone involved in business dashboard design and implementation."

Excel resources

• Process Trends: Kelly O'Day has put together a bunch of tips and tools to help with presenting and working in Excel.
• Andrew's Excel Tips: Andrew demonstrates his exceptional Excel skills in this blog. He's available for Excel consulting (at a reasonable rate) if you need help putting together a particularly challenging Excel tool.
• Jon Peltier, Excel MVP: Not a blog, but a nice resource for Excel tips and tricks, with a focus on charting
• Tips and Tricks A huge archive of (mostly) Excel tips.
• The JLD Excel Blog "This blog is aimed to help Excel users who have not the time or the patience to learn Excel in depth, and to share my experience with others users. You can add your comments in Spanish and in Hebrew too. See the limks in the sidebar."
• Microsoft Excel 12: Specific discussion of what's new in Excel 12. Did you know that the new Excel will allow 1 million rows?

Other suggestions?

I was just informed of our new pay structure {Salary = # of blog posts + 3 * (Web 2.0 References + # of times mentioning AJAX) }, I decided to get my introductory post out here as quickly as possible.

As a recent graduate, I've already been told how insignificant I am, nothing I learned in school is applicable, etc. So if your comments are going to be along those lines, save your breath because I already know (they told me on the first day that they'd trade me for a fairly decent laser printer).

I plan to use this space to comment on design principles, informational organization issues, and various other trendy web topics that might get our site dugg (a condition for activation of my health benefits). I don't want this to become another one of the million "things that piss me off" blogs, but I'm making no promises. If it really starts to become annoying...you can post me on your "things that piss me off" blog.

On that note, I just took a look at the Annual Calendar of Events in the Weekend section of the Washington Post. Being an avid fan of the arts (and by 'arts'...I mean binge drinking), I was excited to see what was in store for the Nation's Capital. My publishing experience is somewhat limited, but I imagine that a successful calendar of events should not look like a glorified CSV file.

Looking at this entry:

JAN. 20: THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Conducted by Charles Dutoit, Jan. 20 at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax. 888-945-2468 or 703-993-8888.

JAN. 20: B.B. KING, BOBBY "BLUE" BLAND AND SHEMEKIA COPELAND Jan. 20 at DAR Constitution Hall, 18th and D NW. 202-397-7328 or 202-638-2661.

A few things stick out.

• ALL CAPS is a bad idea. it doesn't look that bad when its in actual print, but on a computer sceen it's the equivalent to the kid next to you at the movie theatre who wont stop screaming.
• It's an events calendar, not a phone book. The address and phone number of the venue is secondary information. B.B. King is one of the most influential figures in American music, and they don't even link to an article about him in the same weekend section.
• It's the weekend section for God sakes. When I think of the weekend I think of fun, exciting, jovial things. When I look at the Washington Post's annual calendar of events, I feel like a whole lot of Monday morning. I'm not saying to make it look like myspace, but give it some flavor. Some love. Get me excited.

And on that note, I'm going to get ready for the weekend.

Just got a comment from one of our readers: "I like what you have to say, but I had a hard time reading your post on the Excel charts, because that picture made me want to turn away."

Well, it doesn't have to be that bad. We put together an alternative set of default charts that are a little more pleasing to look at.

What did we do? First we picked some colors that would offer contrast, without being scarring to the eyes. Then we went on a "chartjunk" killing spree. Chartjunk is an Edward Tufte term that describes all the stuff in charts that adds no value, distracts from the data, and promotes confusion. For us, chartjunk includes the borders on the chart and around bars or columns, background colors, and even some axes. Gridlines are borderline: they offer modest value in helping a viewer see the height of bars -- we typically change them to an unobtrusive light grey. It takes a lot of clicks to fix up a chart to the Juice-approved format.

Excel has a nice feature that lets you save new chart formats. It's simple (if a little hidden): After you make a good-looking chart, click on Chart/Chart Type/Custom Types, then the "User Defined" radio button. Choose "Add" and name your new chart. Or, if you like the formats you see here, download our user defined graphs. Simply (I say that so you don't get scared) drop this file into the folder at C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel. Maybe you can make a few more and send them back.

One more thing: We made just seven chart types (column, bar, line, column with line on two axes, pie, scatter, bubble). I'm convinced that this set can cover 98% of your charting needs. While Microsoft may offer up donut charts instead of pies and cones instead of columns, please don't bite on those.

At Juice, we do a lot with Excel, but we never, ever, ever use the default Excel graphs. I knew Excel's default graphs were eye-gougingly ugly, but now I can quantify at least one reason why.

Jonathan Snook has a web-based color contrast tool that shows whether two colors have appropriate contrast.

Excel's default line chart (shown below) uses a grey background. I've enlarged the lines slightly to show the default line colors more clearly.

Here are the color contrast results for the grey background and the first 6 colors that Excel uses for lines. None of the first 6 colors used provides appropriate contrast with the background (NO! means there's not enough contrast, YES! means there is—YES! Jonathan's tool is EXUBERANT!).

For those keeping score, that's three "NO!"s and three "sort of"s when comparing the line colors to the background.

You don't need numbers to know ugly when you see it, but it is good to know that there are usability tools out there to help you make your work easier to read.

Here's an analogy about start-ups that we were batting around recently: Perhaps you have seen Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (MXC) on Spike TV. There is a game within this show called "Wall Bangers". Contestants face a wall with a set of paper-covered openings. They are told to charge at the "opening" of their choosing. Unfortunately for them, behind most of the paper openings is solid wall. Crazed with TV fame, the contestants charge at the openings in hopes of bursting through. It looks something like this:

Starting a business can feel the same way: there are few clues of the obstacles you are likely to encounter and plenty of opportunity to go splat. You have a few options:

1. You can make an educated guess as to the best door to charge at, build up momentum by developing a great product, raising money and hiring a skilled team, then throw yourself at the target. If you find the right opportunity, your momentum can thrust you deep into success. At the same time, the risk of a painful flameout is high.

2. You may decide that this game is for fools. Most of the doors are dead-ends. There is never going to be enough information to know what you'll encounter, no matter how much you examine the problem. Better to stay on your side of the wall -- something most of the MXC contestants wish they could choose.

3. The final approach is to go poking at the different openings looking for the one that has real opportunity. Admittedly, this method is both timid and likely to take longer. Maybe an opportunity will disappear -- but it does lets you play the game while avoiding the risk of flattening your face on a wall.

We've just updated our website and blog with our new logo (mmm, slices), a new blogging engine (Wordpress 2.0) and a new look. The redesign in particular was inspired by TextDrive, which has some of the best typography I've seen on the net and a terrific clean aesthetic.

WordPress brings us two benefits: multi-author support and several approaches to spam-killing. We were never able to get multi-author support working in BBlog, our previous blogging platform. This led to a struggle to find the appropriate tone. We now have four employees (welcome, David and Babak!), and we'd like to ensure everyone can contribute their voice.

On the spam side, we've been killing 10 comment spams on a slow day, and many more during the occasional spam storms. It's not a tremendous burden, but I don't like staring into the face of the Internet axis of evil every morning.

So, expect to both see more frequent posts, more variety, more voices, and more practical tips here at the crossroads of business and data.

In the meantime, let us know what you think of the redesign. Here's the new look and here's the old.