Juice Analytics

[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.

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.

A lot of the applications that Juice creates are designed to make information more accessible to people who wouldn’t consider themselves to be data experts. They realize the value in the data that they have, and in many cases they have some sort of analytics solution in place, but they know they’re not getting as much value from their data as they should.

One of the hurdles we frequently come up against is that people who aren’t actively participating in the visualization discussion don’t know what’s possible. All they’ve ever seen, in many cases, are the confusing dashboards, charts, and graphs that are all too prevalent from the vendors in our space. You know the ones: a thick layer of technology slathered with some gloss and wiggle, between two slices of “do it yourself”.

In many cases, we find ourselves closing this gap by referring to some of the best examples of work out there. As we were thinking about this, the idea to provide a simple walk through of these examples came into being. The result: a 30 day calendar chocked full of some of the best samples of skills enhancing examples we could find.

Each day is a bite sized chunk and takes only a few minutes to watch, read, do, or play. Some of the days are comprised of Juice content, but most days are from other sources that we’ve found useful.

You can download it to use yourself, or to share with your friends who need to expand their info-viz horizons. Either way, we think it’ll get your creative juices flowing.

Dear Googlers,

I leave this message for you in the case that you encounter a similar obstacle to your productivity. Internet Explorers 6, 7 and 8 do not like uppercase letters (or hyphens) in the object ID when embedding a swf into the page if you then plan on using the code with ExternalInterface. They do not like it with SWFObject or with the simple old fashioned object tag. The solution was elusive, but there is some help on the ghettocooler.net Treasure Trove.

The following code will work in Firefox and Safari, but will mysteriously have a problem in Internet Explorer:

<script language="javascript">
function submitLemon() {
   var swf = document.getElementById("myContent");
   swf.iCanHasParameter('lemon');
}

swfobject.embedSWF("movie.swf", "myContent", "800",
                   "100%", "9.0.124", null, {}, {bgcolor: '#ffffff'});
</script>

It will however work if you replace the upper case letter with its lowercase equivalent:

<script language="javascript">
function submitLemon() {
   var swf = document.getElementById("mycontent");
   swf.iCanHasParameter('lemon');
}

swfobject.embedSWF("movie.swf", "mycontent", "800",
                    "100%", "9.0.124", null, {}, {bgcolor: '#ffffff'});
</script>

2009 has been a year of sharing here at Juice. First there was our long-used DTP methodology for interactive Excel reporting. Then we released our JuiceKit™ SDK. Today, I want to share another bit of trickery we’ve used to solve a common PowerPoint presentation problem.

The challenge

Let’s say you need to produce the same presentation month after month, updating the data each time. Or maybe you have a set of slides that need to go to a bunch of different audiences each with their own specific market, product, business line, or industry.

Updating all the slides by hand can be tedious, slow and error-prone. The presentation is basically the same, you simply want to swap out the underlying data. You need something that acts like a “mail merge” for PowerPoint.

Our approach

When we’ve helped clients with this situation, our approach has been to create re-usable PowerPoint slides (i.e. templates) that link directly to a database. This gives us the ability to stamp out new presentation by changing the raw data underneath. Simple enough to say; not quite so simple in practice. Here are a few of the hairy bits:

1. Data structuring. We populate the data into a Windows-accessible SQL database such as MS Access or SQL Server so we can use SQL queries to define the data needed for our charts and tables.

2. Slide templates. We create slides with charts, tables, and text boxes that are formatted to account for the variance in the data that may need to be displayed. Ensuring that the charts always look good is surprisingly hard.

3. Connect templates to data. Originally we rolled our own solution by creating a “templating” language that we embedded in the notes section of the slides. More recently, we discovered PTReportGen, a tool that extracts data from a data source and populates it into PowerPoint. PTReportGen allows you to connect objects in the slides (i.e. charts, tables, text boxes) to results from SQL queries from our data source. For each slide, there is a .PTR file that connects the contents of the slide to the database.

4. Scripted production. PTReportGen gives command line control, allowing us to write Python scripts to cycle through our data and populate the charts and tables in our template slides. Because we are interested in generating dozens (sometimes hundreds) of versions of a single slide, our script iterates over the database to pull different results across multiple dimensions. Below is a bit of pseudo-code to give a sense of how the scripting works to produce slides by market and by demographic:

markets = ('Market1','Market2','Market3')
demographics = ('Demo1','Demo2','Demo3')
PTRFileName = 'C:\Documents\UserName\Desktop\MyReportGenerator.ptr'

for demo in demographics:
    for market in markets:
        ReportFileName = 'PathName\FolderName\demo\market.ppt'
        cmd = 'PPTReport.exe PTRFileName -demo -market'

1. Post-processing. While most chart and data table designs can be achieved by clever template layouts, some advanced designs involve additional intervention to achieve the desired level of polish. A python script combs through the result template and adds coloration and layout improvements.

It isn’t simple, but once constructed this “slide factory” is a valuable capability that can free up an enormous amount of time from presentation grunt work. Here’s a short video that gives you a sense of what the process looks like. Personally, I find the production of slides vaguely hypnotic.

Other approaches and resources

We are not the first people to encounter or solve this problem. Below are a few other resources on the topic. I’d be curious if there is a native MS Office solution that I could include in this list.

• PowerPoint Automation Toolkit: “With the PPTATK, PowerPoint becomes a best-case union of a presentation tool and a report writer. With the Tookit, you can build presentations which combine static slides from a slide library and data-driven slides which display charts, tables, and graphs from structured data sources.”

• PresentationPoint: “Generate new up-to-date multimedia reports with 1 click only – put real-time data in your presentations.”

• Microsoft Help: “Working with PowerPoint Presentations from Access Using Automation. Create a PowerPoint slide presentation from scratch using Access data.”

• Stack Overflow discussion on “PowerPoint Automation from MS Access…queries to chart?”

At Juice, we work with web analytics APIs large and small, from Google, comScore and Omniture. The Google Analytics API is our favorite. It powers the world’s best, most widely deployed analytics site. And it powers Juice products like Concentrate (innovative search analytics) and Vasco de Gapi (a tool for exploring the Google Analytics API).

We were approached by the Google Analytics API team to find ways to explore new ways of looking at data with the API, and we were excited by the possibilities. We’ve been working on our own visualization framework, JuiceKit™, that integrates the power of the Flare Visualization Library with Adobe Flex.

The result is Analytics Visualizations, two visualizations powered by the Google Analytics API that are free to use. You just need a Google account with access to Google Analytics data to explore your own data.

Referrer Flow

Curious about what sites are linking to you and what content is benefitting the most? Referrer Flow answers those question and shows how results change over time. Here is a brief video introduction:

Referrer Flow is a stream of daily treemaps showing pageviews and bounce rates for various groupings of your website’s pages. You can group by combinations of page title, referrer and url. Clicking on the treemap will filter all the data by the page, referrer or url that you clicked on. Click again to clear your filter.

Keyword Tree

A list of top keywords isn’t enough to really understand how people are searching and finding your site. Keyword Tree visually displays the most frequently used search keywords and how they are used together. Here’s a video overview:

You’ll see a frequently used search term at the center and the words and phrases that are most often used in combination with that word. Pick a different starting word by typing into the box in the upper right or selecting from the top word across the bottom of the screen. The words are sized by their frequency of use and colored by bounce rate (or % new visitors or average time on site). Roll over a word to see details about that combination of connected words.

Depth and Discovery

In designing these visualizations we focused on the question: how can we let users uncover the unexpected? That means designing targeted visualizations focused on limited well-defined issues. The Referrer Flow monomaniacally focuses on a single question “What pages are people viewing on your site and where are they coming from?” The Keyword Tree is laser-focused on word ordering and what that means for keyword performance.

The Google Analytics reporting tool is a great general-purpose reporting solution. It gives the advanced users everything they need to answer specific questions. However, its generality means it has limited ability to focus on two issues; depth and discovery.

The Google Analytics API is Google’s solution to this problem. It’s an opportunity both for businesses like ours that can create new ways of analyzing data, and for large sites that can use the API for integration, custom analytics, and more.

Thanks to Nick Mihailovski at Google for his gracious support, help and encouragement and Avinash Kaushik for inspiring this idea.

The following is an excerpt from our three-part series: “A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use”. It is chock full of best practices and practical tips for designing dashboards. This particular nugget is something we’ve used to great effect and wanted to make sure our readers didn’t miss out simply because they were afraid of ending up on our mailing list. There is even a movie version.

We’d like to offer a simple framework for effective use of fonts in your dashboard. With a few simple decisions, you can ensure that the text on the dashboard will both look good and communicate effectively. The majority of text on the page falls into four categories:

• Body text is clean, readable content
• Headers separate and name major sections of your work
• Notes describe additional things the reader should be aware of. These should fade into the background unless we call attention to them.
• Emphasis text is what we want our reader to pay particular attention to.

The following table describes an approach for deciding how to display each of these text types. The yellow highlights indicate where you need to make decisions.

It comes down to three basic decisions:

• Choose size and font of the body text
• Decide if the header is going to flip to serif or sans-serif—and whether it is going to have any style
• Decide what to do about emphasis—color or (bold or italic)

A few things things don’t fit neatly into one of the four text categories listed above, such as table headers and graph titles. We tend to use a combination of styles to handle these exceptions.

Stick to this framework and we guarantee your dashboard will look better. Take a look at this example, starting with a standard-looking Excel report without out much thought put toward the fonts:

Several weeks ago we published Part 1: Foundation of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use, and a couple of weeks after that we released Part 2: Structure. Today, we’re making Part 3: Information Design available for download. In this part, we provide practical tips for putting information on the page in a way that communicates effectively to your audience.

If you’ve already registered, you will be receiving this volume automatically via email. However, if you’ve been waiting for “a better deal”, you’re in luck. Right now, you can download all three parts for FREE! That’s right, free. As in $0. And we’re waiving the shipping and handling charges as well. Just click here to register and get your copy today!

(For those of you who are paying attention, we didn’t actually charge for the first two parts either. They’ve always been free, but sometimes folks need to feel like they’re getting a good deal. If you really want to give and get free stuff, check out freecycle.org – through it’s “reuse” charter, it helps our environment by keeping good stuff out of the landfill.)

Thanks again for reading!

About two weeks ago we released the first part of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use. We hope that you’ve already downloaded that document and have found it to be useful.

Today, we’re making Part 2: Structure available for download. If you’ve already registered, you will be receiving this second installment automatically via email. However, if you’ve been denying that little voice in your head telling you to “just click it”, now’s your chance. Register today and get both parts!

Of course, all registrants will get part 3 when we make it available in a few weeks. Happy reading!

It’s been a busy summer for us here at Juice with more and more companies asking us to help them take their data and create dashboard applications that help them get more done. While working on these accounts, we’ve seen an ever increasing interest and awareness in proper dashboarding techniques.

We believe that the best software is the software that people like love to use. Typically they “love it” because it helps them get their job done quicker and/or better. This can be for any of a number of reasons, but it’s great to see that buyers are becoming less satisfied with junky information applications.

So, we’ve decided to share the wealth. We’ve decided to compile many of the design tips we’ve harvested from our client projects over the years. These learnings are collected into a 3 part paper entitled A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use (catchy, isn’t it?). We’ve written this to help people who want to create information applications that break out of the horrible constraints of the industry-standards we’ve all seen and have been disappointed with.

We’ve made this paper available to folks who we’ve done business with or who have registered with us in the past, but we didn’t want our readers to be left out. If you didn’t receive an invitation to download the paper (maybe because you’re one of those lurkers out there -shame on you now’s your chance to be part of the “in crowd”. If you’re interested, register to download your own copy of Part 1: Foundation. For those who register, we’ll be mailing Parts 2 (Structure) and 3 (Information Design) over the next few weeks.

We think you’ll find it really useful and hope you’ll let us know how it helps you communicate your information more effectively.