Freedom in the 50 States is a very nice site showing how states compare along a variety of measures of freedom. Included in the list are your freedom to gamble, smoke marijuana, drink alcohol, have bachelor parties, and shoot off fireworks and guns. Note: please do not exercise all your freedoms at once.

The colored map and detailed drill-down show 37 measures, yet they forgot to include one important freedom: your freedom to communicate data with ease and create interactive infographics in minutes. Don’t worry, we’ve got a heaping-helping of info-liberation. So before you send an angry e-mail to your congressman, take a look at what we put together with Slice in under an hour:

Like the Freedom site, we want users to be able to choose a metric and be able to see which states are freedom-loving and which are freedom-hating (I’m look at you, South Dakota, with your anti-bachelor party policies). That’s our new “map slice” in action, which can color states based on our data or overlay colored bubbles to visualize locations.

To add even more data exploring fun, we created a visualization to let you compare two states side by side.  Check out how North Dakota totally dominates California on freedoms.

Having flexed my information visualization freedom muscles, I’m off to ride my bike without a helmet while drinking a 32-ounce soda.

Good data communication hinges on picking right chart. The patterns and insights almost magically emerge when you choose a chart or visualization that emphasizes the important elements in your data. Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest struggles for inexperienced presenters of data.

I don’t like to knock our own stuff, but a little healthy introspection is always a good thing. Consider our popular ChartChooser tool. In spite of it’s carefully crafted name (it was core of an ad campaign akin to peanut butter: Choosy chart choosers choose ChartChooser — no, not really), we’ve come to believe that ChartChooser isn’t so useful for the “Chooser” part; it is useful because the “Chart” part is nicely formatted, downloadable PowerPoint and Excel charts.

Here are the filtering choices for ChartChooser:

I’ve been at this a while and I still don’t always know how to connect what I’m trying to express with words as vague and broad as ‘Composition’ or ‘Relationship’.

It isn’t entirely ChartChooser’s fault. Basic chart types are by nature broad and flexible in their usage. How can we make it easier for someone to make that leap from their question to a visualization that best answers it?

We believe one part of the solution is to make visualizations more purposeful. That is, create re-usable ways of expressing data that are carefully designed to answer common questions that people pose about their data.

While it’s true that everyone’s data is unique, what we’ve learned is that in most cases, the things they want to know about their data aren’t so unique. The same sets of question patterns show up time after time. It’s almost like a game of Mad Libs:

• Which are my top performing _plural noun_?
• Which _plural noun_ are the most significant outliers when measured by _ measure_ and _ measure_?
• Which _plural noun_ have improved or declined the most over the last _time period_?
• How does _singular noun_ compare to _singular noun_ across my important performance measures?

Our goal is to draw straight, obvious lines between questions like these and a visualization that directly and simply expresses an answer.

If you consider the last data Mad Lib question above, our match-up visualization is a good example: compare two things side by side to see relative performance. The Match-up was inspired by the traditional tale-of-the-tape graphics that you used to see in boxing matches.

Like a lot of our visualizations in Slice, we’ve added a number of key features that really help the user quickly understand and explore the data. Here are a couple examples:

We’ve put together a whole collection of these purposeful visualizations, such as a funnel visualization for sales conversions and other processes; a leaderboard for ranking top items across a bunch of measures (try it free here), and a comments visualization for reviewing and exploring survey verbatims, tweets, and other descriptions. And we’ll be making more. What questions do you ask of your data?

Over the years you’ve seen a few blog posts from the Juice Team on football, the American variety. We thought it made sense to give the world’s most popular version of football a little love since the Major League Soccer (MLS) season just got underway.

As we started our journey to pay tribute to the beautiful game, we came to realize much like the recent Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that fútbol is just starting to get its data on. Check out this view of team performance created in Slice.

This data comes from the MLS Soccer Team Stats page.

The Tournament is upon us. And if you know about picking a brackets, you know it comes down to match-ups, strong guard play, and choosing at least one 12-seed to beat a 5-seed. You also know the winner of your office pool will inevitably be that one non-basketball fan who picks teams based on mascots.

Since we’re bound for disappointment, why not have some fun with data. Our resident Iona grad, Michel, put together this slick Sliceboard that ranks the tournament teams by offensive and defensive stats. Notice how his school pours in 81 points a game as the 2nd most prolific offense in the tournament. They also manage to have the 2nd worst defense. Sorry Michel, defense wins Championships.

This weekend is the start of the NFL Combine. It is where roughly 300 of the top college football players show off the physical prowess, strength, speed, agility to NFL teams to help their status in the upcoming April draft.

In case you end up catching a glance of the festivities and want to know a little bit more about the players, below you’ll find a few visualizations that might help you learn a little about that player from Lehigh or the guy who did 38 bench presses of 225 lbs.

Use the search capability on each of these to find the player, position, conference or grade that you want to learn more about. We grabbed the data from NFL.com and CBSsports.com. Enjoy!

Leaderboard: Ranks players across multiple measures.

Comment View: Read quick summaries of players

Table: Search, sort, and find player details

Ok, we’re gonna take an informal survey. Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced this:

You’re sitting through yet another dull, data-heavy presentation packed full of repetitive charts. A question gets raised, and the presenter flips furiously to find a relevant chart on page 53. A colleague squints at a dense table of numbers, wondering what it all means.

We’ve all been there. And oh! how painful. Too many times we’ve seen the aftermath of the indiscriminate boardroom presentation bore-athons. Well, it’s time to make it stop!

As a result, we at Juice challenged ourselves to find a way for ordinary business folks to create engaging, interactive presentations that leave the dreary days of Death by PowerPoint behind and bring new life to the data-presentation experience. Our solution is called Slice.

Over the last year we’ve worked with dozens of organizations to refine and enhance how Slice works. Our customers come from a diverse array of industries, from research organizations to healthcare service providers to advertising agencies.

Here’s what we learned. There are many great data analysis tools out there like Tableau for ad hoc analysis, SAS and R for statisticians, and a myriad of others. However, we’ve heard repeatedly from real users that these tools fall flat on helping people become data presenters.

Slice solves that data presentation problem.

Once you’ve done the analysis and you know what to communicate, packaging the results in the proper way is critical. But, to do it right

• You want the design to be striking, but you’re not a designer;
• You want engaging interactivity, but you’re not a developer and the IT wait list is overflowing;
• You might cobble something together using Excel and PowerPoint, but mediocrity is not what you’re looking for.

Slice removes these constraints by focussing on the last mile of business intelligence: presenting data with the visual precision, interactivity and excellence in a way that sparks engagement.

We are really excited about how Slice makes a difference for people who have struggled too long with delivering data-rich presentations or reports. Interested in seeing the advantage Slice can give you? We’ve just released a new version and we’d be happy to set you up with a 30-day trial. Go to our Slice page, fill out the form, and we’ll be in touch.

Most of our work ends up as business-to-business data solutions (like US News’ Academic Insights), but occasionally we create visualization solutions for broader public consumption. One example is the new website for The Essential Economy Council, a non-profit and research organization based in Atlanta, GA. They’ve collected nine years Georgia Deptartment of Labor data and we’re helping them turn it into a compelling and easy to understand story.

Go ahead and check out the interactive map of Georgia to learn about an important and under-represented portion of our economy.

The mad scientists over in Juice Labs cooked up a new treat for you all just in time for Halloween Thanksgiving.  We’ve crossbred some NFL Data (courtesy of our fellow friend in data Brian Burke) with a visualization we’ve kept under wraps for a while called The Spider. Now before any of you that suffer from arachnophobia start to freak out, this isn’t the spider that you may be accustomed to.  The Spider visualization helps you understand the offensive rush tendencies for every NFL team for the last 4 seasons.  EVERY rush that ever happened in the NFL from 2008-2011 is captured in the visualization. Information about the average yards gained, total yards gained, and the number of plays in each direction are also included. You may be surprised to find out which direction the Green Bay Packers run to on 4th and inches or how unsuccessful Arian Foster has historically been running the football on 1st and long situations (he’s a pretty awesome RB otherwise). You can filter the data by week, season, down, distance, player, and/or the opposing defense. Try it out for yourself here for some deliciously filling insights.

How to Read the Chart:
The thickness of the spider leg represents the number of rushes in that direction. A thicker line means more rushes were attempted to that area. The length of the spider leg stops on the average yards gained per rush in that direction. Click or hover over each leg for more detailed information about the team’s offensive rush tendencies.

The Juice Analytics team will be in Nashville July 9 – 11, 2012 and while we can’t carry a tune, we’ll have with us an interactive demo of our hosted reporting platform to share. Of course, we’ll also share the latest around dashboard and interface design, as well as data visualization, in general, along with other stuff that interests you.

Reach out if you’d like to meet up while we’re in town.

(P.S. If other cities have pent up demand for Juice, reach out and we’ll consider a visit.)

Cheers!

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.