Juice Analytics

Most dashboards just talk and don’t listen. Have you ever been in a “conversation” with someone and they talk 90% of the time. They ask you a question and while you’re 15 seconds into answering they interrupt and starting offloading their mountains of insight. It’s mostly about them. And their consideration for you? Not so much.

That is what most dashboards do. Blah, blah, blah. What if…

What if the information presentations we interacted with actually acknowledged who they’re talking to, listened more, and talked less? What if we were to replace the focus on data with a conversation and a way of working out the complexities of data between two or more people.

To do this properly, think about what a “good conversation” is. Here are a few characteristics we came up with:

• The people have similar experience around a topic; so they know what they’re talking about, but because every person is unique, they’ve gathered unique insight that can be shared. The varying, educated perspective keeps the conversation interesting.
• The one doesn’t overly interrupt the other. Sure there may be reasons to interrupt here and there, but, if interruption is the norm, it quickly gets as annoying (and rude) as your cable news political analyst.
• There is a sense of genuine care for what the other person is saying because, well… there is a genuine sense for what the other person is saying. Too often people get caught up in the “tricks” of networking and small talk and “the hook.” What if people actually respond to what’s genuine?
• Distractions are minimal. One person isn’t constantly checking their phone or entertaining other interests. People are very adept at sensing interest. They do this by reading you: body language, eyes, word usage, how you breathe, pace of speech, and inflection to name a few. If you are actually interested in hearing what another else has to say, they will know.
• You trust the other person. There is an assumed authenticity about each other. This is slow to build and easy to break.

So there’s a few qualities of good conversation, but why? People don’t often stop to think about why they enjoy good conversation. Let’s look at the benefits:

• Your perspective is sharpened. You don’t have to live through the same experience the other person did in order to benefit from their insight. That is, if you trust what they are saying. This is a big time saver! Imagine if no one acted on anything but personally experienced information. You may know some people like that. They flounder, spending more time re-discovering rather than benefiting.
• Your momentum is accelerated. Good conversations with trustworthy friends or experts is one of the biggest ways we overcome obstacles and keep momentum in life.
• A dependable relationship is formed. You know if you ever want to talk about “x” topic again, where to turn. As the trust is built in that conversation, you are also setting this person as someone you can turn for solid footing when future steps are required.
• Great conversations lighten your burden. Joking isn’t trivial, in fact, some the most serious conversations benefit from humor. It promotes an open mind and releases misplaced pressure over circumstances.

Now, why is a designer at a visualization, dashboarding, software company talking about all these warm fuzzies?! Presenting information is about people. We’re adamant about that at Juice. We’ve been focusing on what people actually want out of their data for a long time. Why? Because it’s a hole in the market and it’s fundamental to knowing what people both need and want to see out of “information experiences” they encounter. Until we appreciate the qualities and benefits of good conversations, we don’t have a firm foundation for sharing and communicating data.

You’re saying, “Well, that’s all fine and good, but how in the world does this play out in an application or dashboard?.” I’m glad you asked. This concept is something of deep interest at Juice and the thoughts here represent the tip of the iceberg. As we actively work through these concepts, we’ll look to provide practical examples in the coming months.

Questions
What are some of the qualities of an enjoyable conversation you’ve had this week?
How did it affect your day?
In what ways could you imagine your dashboard just talking and not listening?

Dig Deeper
This talk by John Cleese (of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) is one of the best on creativity I’ve ever seen, and it speaks to the seriousness of humor, for the jokesters among you.

Evaluate and apply some related design principles to your application: Make it conversational, Use common language, Consider data comfort and expertise.

Clad in neon green from their jerseys to their shoes, the Baylor Bears advanced to the South Regional finals in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament last night, leading by as many as 18 points in a game that was pretty hard to watch. Literally.

Can Color Create a Competitive Advantage?

Spectators had lots to say about Baylor in the Georgia Dome last night, but instead of commenting about their talent, skill and ball handling, most people talked about the obnoxious neon “green” color that the Bears and their fans were wearing. Their neon green uniforms (think “tennis ball” yellow) made it nearly impossible to keep your eyes off of them — yet for many of us, was a complete distraction from the game itself.

As I tried to watch, I thought about the critical role that color plays in the communication of data and information. By highlighting certain details with color, we choose to draw attention to them or put greater emphasis on them. At the same time, color has the potential to confuse or distract our audience if the color we select conflicts with the message or purpose we have in mind.

Can color impact outcomes, giving one team a greater (and perhaps unfair) advantage over another? Could the Baylor Bear’s neon uniforms be playing a part in their success?

What are your thoughts?

For more on color and tips for your next presentation, design or data visualization, see “Color Has Meaning”.

Spring is a great time to spruce things up.  While you’re at it, consider adding a little shine to you and your skills.

We’ve made it easy for you by adding five more videos to our resources page that will help sharpen your saw, as Stephen Covey might say, in this important area of your life.  From graphing to table design, color to typography best practices, you’ll find these video tutorials full of tips, tricks and tidbits that you’ll be using long after the pollen rinses away and your antihistamine goes back in the drawer.

And, just in case you’ve been fogged over, we launched a new page on our site a few weeks ago, Design Principles. If designing from the human perspective interests you, you’ll find this a valued extension to your knowledgebase.  

Achoo! (That is, here’s to you!)

[Insert witty opening here].

You see? In principle, when writing a blog post, I know it draws you (the reader) in to continue reading by starting with a story or something smart or a joke. Don’t overwhelm people right from the get-go. Start with metaphor or phrase that relates to the article.

That introduction relates to what I’m really interested in talking about: principles. We’re launching an exciting new resource today, and it has to do with principles, design principles that is. These resource will remind you to do things like use gradients appropriately or provide instruction. Their goal is to direct your design towards information presentation that focuses on the human element.

Engineers start with technology. MBAs start with funding. Designers start with people. The trick is to get interdisciplinary teams to raise their collective I.Q. by working in the overlap of those three areas. That’s where innovation flourishes.Moggridge

At Juice, we start with people and great consideration for that overlap. Therefore, we’re not only about what information to show but also how to show it. And behind those two basic ideas is an awful lot of thinking > developing > learning > and iteration. Through that process we’ve gathered a (rather long) list of principles that inform our decisions, and we hope it can help you with yours too. Rather than trying to be sure your application supports all principles, approach it more like a stack of flash cards and pull out the relevant ones. With experience, you’ll realize you’re doing these things naturally and understanding the drivers of design thinking is invaluable to introduce objectivity into application design.

There are two parts to this:

1. View the list and explore the content on our Design Principles page.
2. Engage in discussion on our Quora Design Principles Board.

This list will likely grow and shrink over time through the refinement process. The descriptions of each principle definitely will. Our goal is not to be exhaustive, but helpful.

There is a slight catch. So far, we’ve only fully a few of the many principles, which means we have a long way to go. We’re going to embrace process on this one with what might appear to be a (very intentional) turtle’s pace. Still, we’ve made the titles as concretely informative as we could before filling out all their content. Feel free to to run (err walk) right along side us or check in every now and then to evaluate your projects against the list. If you find these helpful or would like to share your experience or opinion on any of them we invite you to engage in the discussion, vote up and down the principles you find more or less useful. Share your insights why. Let us know which one you’d like to see next. Keep us honest, and the visualization community successful. Happy designing.

How do you find the best of the best? The National Football League holds a combine every year where the top college football players run, jump and press. We took that data and put it into our leaderboard visualization to let you explore these physical freaks.

A leaderboard lets you focus on exceptions; the best and worst performers across different characteristics. Everyone or everything that’s not superlative (or lousy) is available but not emphasized.

By looking across multiple characteristics you can see one person’s strengths and weaknesses. Here’s a quick overview of how it works.

Or jump in and try it out with your own data. One note: this visualization requires IE 9 or higher or Safari/Chrome/Firefox.

We’re working on a revamp of the popular chart chooser that would include more tools like this so let us know what you think.

Do you have your child’s drawing on the wall of your cube, office or maybe at home on the fridge? Can you remember visualizing the world that simply?  When was the last time you looked at anything quite that way? What if you did?

Well, we did just that. And, our effort resulted in a video to share with people about what we do here at Juice.  We hope you like it.

(P.S. Thank your kid for the artwork covering that stain on your wall — and for the great analogy.)

Our founder and CEO, Zach Gemignani, went on the road recently to speak to a group of Voice of the Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts at the Allegiance Engage Summit in Park City, Utah.  (Thanks for taking one for the team, Zach.)

Zach’s overall objective was to demonstrate how attendees could gain clear, actionable insights from consumer data.  I’m told that Zach delivered his message about as well as he crafted the data visualizations he used to build it.  In fact, it is rumored that Zach was so engaging that he was compared to none other than Guy Kawasaki, who was also speaking at the Summit.  (Fellow Juicers made mention of head room issues following that comment.)

Allegiance Radio will be airing a podcast of an interview with Zach from the Engage Summit on June 7 at 3:30 p.m. EDT on www.blogtalkradio.com,  Join via VoIP, chat or via phone at (619) 996-1642.  www.blogtalkradio/allegiance/2011/06/07/allegiance-summit-an-interview-with-juice-analytics

You can go to their website anytime after that to review the interview in its entirety.  Following the podcast, we will post a copy of the interview here on our website, as well.

Following is a summary of key content from Zach’s presentation along with resources that may inspire you to get to know your consumer data better to gain insights to move your business forward.  If you have questions or comments, feel free to send them our way.

Know Your Audience

Consider and understand the context of your audience.  ”Actionable” has as much to do with the recipient as the information.  Is it something they have the power or the influence on which to act?

Know Your Tools

Whatever your tool is, it’s worth your while to get good at it.  This saves you time and frustration.

Choose the Right Data

The gourmet values data quality – the right metrics, the right context, presented effectively.  The gourmand, on the other hand, is more interested in quantity. A gourmand believes that more is better, in part because they aren’t sure what they’ll do with the data in the first place.  (See the entire “Data Gourmet” blog at www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/being-a-data-gourmet/

Focusing on just the right data is a concept perhaps best summarized by Amanda Cox. “Data isn’t like your kids.  You don’t have to pretend to love them equally.” – Amanda Cox, New York Times

Choosing the Right Chart

So, how do you choose the right chart?  This is the challenge. Work by taking the most important attributes of your data (based on the question you want to answer) — mapping to the visual elements that most effectively convey that information.

Resources include www.chartchooser.com, www.extremepresentation.com/design/charts and www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/chart-selection-art-and-science/

Tell a Story

You have choices about how data is presented.  Make your choices deliberately.  Consider your audience, their needs and the information.   Then tell a story that clearly resonates with them and compels them — inspires them —  into action.

Last night I read Andrew Abela’s recently released e-book The Presentation: A Story About Communicating Successfully With Very Few Slides. Abela is a presentation guru (and friend of Juice) who travels the country fighting the good fight against “Death by PowerPoint.”

His focus is a little different than the Nancy Duarte (Slide:ology) and Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen) who focus on conveying a message with images and minimal text. While that style has a place for “Ballroom Presentations”, Abela sees a need for a different type of presentation for “Conference room Presentations.”

The wise professor in his story (I prefer to describe myself as an Indiana Jones-style entrepreneur in my narratives), explains the important characteristics of conference room style presentations as the following:

“they have extensive—but always relevant—detail; they are printed, not projected; and every slide must pass the squint test.””

The story also outlines one of his core presentation principles, the SCoRE method, which involves repeating a pattern of Complication, Resolution, and Example. It is a story-telling technique that builds audience buy-in as you go along.

Abela has taken his own advice by persuading his audience using a compelling story filled with complications, resolutions, and examples. I really recommend this entertaining, quick read as a great refresher for the core concepts of his Extreme Presentation method. You can sign-up for Abela’s mailing list and to receive a free copy.

We’re back from beautiful Seattle having immersed ourselves in the data visualization party known as the 2010 Tableau Customer Conference. It was a wonderfully planned and executed conference during which we met lots of great Tableau users, exchanged data visualization tips, and learned a bunch about what Tableau is up to in version 6.0 (the most highly anticipated enhancement is no doubt the 100x performance improvement of the data engine.) The folks at Tableau are definitely ramping up for some great things and it was a privilege to be part of it.

As most of you know our core business is about building custom information applications to make information accessible to everyone, not just analysts. But we do so love the work they’re doing over at Tableau and keep a close eye on them. As a result, when they extended an offer for us to speak, we were thrilled.

Following our sessions, I was all excited about the reaction we had gotten from our attendees when one of my coworkers pointed out that I had made a terrible mistake: I neglected to give proper credit to Stephen Few. Part of the content that we covered was about how to effectively position elements in an information display to make it easy for the brain to understand what it’s seeing. To do this we discussed “6 Principles of Visual Context”:

• Principle of Proximity – Things that are visually close to each other are related
• Principle of Similarity – Things that look like each other (size, color, shape) are related
• Principle of Enclosure – Things that are enclosed by a shape are related
• Principle of Closure – We see incomplete shapes as complete
• Principle of Continuity – Things that are aligned are related
• Principle of Connection – Things that are visually connected are related

A great set of guidelines that explain so much about why some things make visual sense and others don’t.

However, in the heat of the moment, I neglected to point out that these principles are based on some very nice work Stephen performed a while back. We’re big fans of his and want to make sure we give credit where credit’s due. So, if you you’re not familiar with these principles, or haven’t reviewed them recently, please check them out. Very powerful stuff.

As far as the conference goes, if you’re a Tableau user, you should plan on attending next year. At about 700 attendees, it was nearly twice as big as the 2009 conference, and if the passion and excitement of Christian Chabbot is any indication, next year will be even bigger and even better.

I recently ran a few training sessions about how to visualize and present complex data. The high point was a series of “extreme slide makeovers” in which I honed the message and cleaned up visuals from existing presentations. Here are some ideas to tame busy, confusing slides.

1. Simplify your slide master, make room for content. Fancy borders, elaborate fonts, and background images do little to impress your audience. They leave little room for communication, either. For those saddled with frilly corporate slides, you’ll have to take on the Brand Standards Police.

   It may help to get quantitative. Consider this PowerPoint standard slide master. Less than 50% of the total slide area (highlighted in green) is available for content.

   
   

2. Say something once, why say it again? The Talking Heads sang: You’re talkin’ a lot, but you’re not sayin’ anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?

   Wordy slides can be confusing and tedious. The author is using a lot of words—and often lots of qualifiers—in hopes that the core point lies somewhere within. The burden of synthesis is shifted to the audience. That’s not fair.

3. Make one point per slide. The take-away sentence on your slide should clearly state your point; the data on the slide should support that point. Any information that is tangential to the key concept can be pushed to an appendix or supporting slide.

4. Redundancies cause unnecessary repetition. I was surprised in my slide makeovers how often I found information that could be consolidated to simplify the slide. Redundancy came in many forms: multiple graphs repeating the same legend, axis labels that are described in a chart title, restating the same point.

5. Christmas is over, take down the decorations. Clear out clip art, “screenbeans”, and other images used to dress up the slide. Most effects are less “dazzling” than you might think. Eliminate gradients, shadows, 3D effects, and most animations. These design effects were exciting 10 years ago. But if they don’t help you communicate, move on.

   On the other hand, consider using full-screen photos as a way to convey a idea or theme, accompanied by few words. Here’s an example from a presentation I gave a few months back:

   

6. Reduce chart-junk. Excel and PowerPoint charts come pre-packaged with a heaping helping of chart-junk (“unnecessary or confusing visual elements”). Here are a few things I change in a default column chart: no shaded background, grey gridlines, no chart outline, no y-axis line, no column outlines, turn off auto resize text, change column colors to increase contrast. If you want to save yourself from chart-junk induced carpal tunnel syndrome, check out Chris’ chart cleaner Excel add-in. Sometimes charts aren’t necessary at all. If you’re using a pie or stacked column chart to show a single data point, the number alone will do the job more clearly.

   
   

7. Delete your “Text-junk” too. Text can contain “chart-junk” too—visual distractions in text that dilute your message.

   • Title Capitalization or Other Excessive and inconsistent use of Capital Letters. Title caps doesn’t make sense to use and is more difficult to read.
   • Underlining. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, use bold or italics.
   • Don’t use bullets when there is only one item or sentence. People have become so accustomed to using bullets that they’ll use them when they are totally unnecessary.
   • Bad fonts: The worst is Comic Sans MT, as the LMNOP blog describes: “These days, just like an e-mail from an “@ aol.com” address has a distinct lack of credibility, an e-mail written in this font makes the sender seem ridiculous and out of touch.”

8. Simplify style and formatting. Inconsistent colors, fonts, font sizes, and other styles are a subtle distraction. Limit yourself to three font colors (emphasis!, normal, low-emphasis), three font sizes, and three font styles. Here’s an example.

   Three colors

   

   Three sizes

   

   Three font-styles

   

   Putting it all together

   

All these points can be summed up as: Make everything on your slide serve your story. Best wishes for 2008!