Juice Analytics

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.

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.

Today we are pleased to release another free tool on Juice Labs. The Comment visualization is the perfect way to exploring qualitative data like text survey responses, tweets, or product reviews. A few of the fun features:

• Color comments based on a selected value
• Filter comments using an interactive distribution chart at the top
• Highlight the most interesting comments by selecting the flags in the upper right
• Show the author and other contextual information about a comment

Below is an example with information about Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars. 

For another example, browse data about the most popular Reddit IAmAs for 2012.

Like our other free visualization tools in Juice Labs, the Comments visualization is designed for ease of use and sharing. Just drop in your own data, choose what fields you want to show as text and as values, and the visualization will immediately reflect your choices. The save button gives you a link that includes your data and settings.

If you enjoy this tool, definitely try out our Leaderboard or searchable, sortable Table.  Or if you want to incorporate a series of these visualizations together in an interactive report or dashboard, contact us about Slice.

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.  

[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.

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.