A few weeks ago Juice asked our readers to give us a few insights into whether or not we and other info-viz sites are actually helping them and their organizations be more effective at communicating information.

Well, the time has come to take a look at the results (oooh - pins and needles). The survey was way more popular than we expected, receiving well over 500 responses.

We had a few questions that were of the form "select the answer that best describes you" but, for the most part, we focussed on text based answers so that we could try to avoid directing the answers and could demonstrate some non-traditional visualization styles to explore results. As a side note, the open ended answers to the text based questions were truly intriguing to read - hopefully the presentation of the results below will give you a small insight to what we learned.

So, here are the results.

Survey Results

The first section of questions dealt with getting some context about our readers. Since the questions were multiple choice, we're showing the results in traditional bar chart format.

Question 1

In terms of size, which of the following is your company most like?

• A one man band
• The Dirty Dozen
• The University of Rhode Island
• Microsoft

Question 2

In terms of information presentation expertise, who do you see yourself as?

• The Excel Chart Wizard incarnate (I'm happy with the quickest route)
• Harold and the Purple Crayon (I'm pretty good, but not too finicky)
• A Tufte clone (every chart is carefully and lovingly crafted with intention)

Question 3

If your company were stuck on Gilligan's Island, would you be able to use information presentation to get rescued?

• No, Gilligan keeps using our Tufte books to prop up the break room table.
• Maybe. The Skipper rigged up this island beacon system using coconuts, vines, and tiki torches.
• You betcha! The Professor could build a huge island sized information display that could be seen, understood, and acted upon by the astronauts on the International Space Station.

Question 4

What two information sources do you most frequently use for information presentation tips, trends, and best practices?

• BI Vendor's website (e.g., Business Objects, Tableau, Cognos, etc.)
• The Dashboard Spy
• Dashboards by Example
• FlowingData
• Infographic News
• Information Aesthetics
• Jorge Camoes' Charts
• Juice Analytics
• Junk Charts
• Tufte's web Site
• Visual Business Intelligence (Stephen Few's site)
• VizThink
• Other

However, What we really want to know is what sites are most closely related. So we tried looking at them with a phrase net from ManyEyes:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

This is a great way to demonstrate how sites are "connected". We see a very strong relationship between Juice and the other non-Juice sites, but not a strong relationship between the non-Juice sites, themselves. In retrospect, the question would have been more effective had we asked respondents for their "top three or four" sites (approximately: total number of options ÷ 3).

The next group of questions were crafted to help us understand the problems our users and their organizations are encountering when it comes to presenting information to stakeholders and users. For most of these questions we broke the number one rule in surveys: stay away from text based answers.

Question 5

Using one word for each, list three things that you most frequently find useful from these sources?

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

This was one of the most useful result sets and clearly shows that people like examples and new ideas for visualizations, followed by tips on how to get it done. (I'm hoping this post meets all of those criteria to some level.)

Question 6

Within your organization, would you say the understanding of information visualization best practices is:

• Staying the same
• Improving

Question 7

What one word describes the biggest barrier to improved information presentation at your company?

I selected a Wordle (as opposed to a tag cloud) for questions 7 and 8 because I wanted to see the results in a way that would give me the general feeling of the barriers and benefits - I wanted the answers to spur some sort of emotive response. I think a Wordle does this better than a tag cloud.

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

Question 8

What one word describes the biggest boon to improved information presentation at your company?

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

While the "barriers" answers were interesting, there are some real nuggets hidden in these "benefits" results.

Question 9

Finish this sentence: "My company would be oh so much better at information presentation if we just had..."

What we really want to know is what are the patterns and relationships between words. Having said that, the most common words are still interesting to see:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

But, we are really interested in the word patterns. So, we used the Juice search patterns tools Concentrate to identify patterns. The top patterns were

Now, if we look at how the "non-common" words relate visually, here's what we get:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

Question 10

Finish this sentence: "If I were to advise someone on how to best improve your capability to create really useful information presentation solutions, I'd say don't forget..."

Again, it's interesting to see the most commonly used words:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

But the most value again comes from looking at the phrase net:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

Question 11

Finally, we're going to post results on our blog for free download. However, if you want us to notify you when the report is ready, please provide your email address below. (And because we have a large international following, please add your country as well, if you don't mind. Why? 'cuz we're just curious. Thanks!)

So, we're going to show only the countries here, no email addresses (whew!). Let's start with looking at the standard distribution:

And here's the geographic representation from Many Eyes:

( You can experiment with it yourself here. )

But, having looked at that, I thought it might be a little more interesting to look at the country locations like this (text sized based on number of participants):

Additional Insights

And that was all of the questions that were in the survey. However, I thought some of the multiple choice "context" question required just a bit more analysis; there were some questions I still had that weren't yet answered. So, I loaded the data into Tableau's Public version of their application to give a little more analysis flexibility. Here is the dashboard I created to better understand expertise:

What this shows is that organizations that are more capable of responding to tough information presentation challenges have a substantially higher ration of "Tufte Clones".

And this made me wonder how skills basis might be impacting different sizes of companies:

A pretty nice linear correlation between company size and improvement trends, don't you think?

You made it to the end!

This post turned out to be much longer than I wanted it to be, but hopefully you found it interesting and learned a few things about your fellow readers and how to display different kinds of survey responses. If you have other insights you think you see, please comment below! Thanks for participating!

To fly is to be frustrated. If you've been traveling for long, you no doubt have your opinions about what airlines and airports are the biggest sources of suffering. Whether it is weather delays, getting stuck on the tarmac due to air traffic, maintenance problems, or missing a connection, it all feels outside of your control.

But a little knowledge can help. The Bureau of Transportations has maintained a giant database of air traffic information for decades of flights -- point of origin, flight times, flight delays, type of delay, etc. It is 72 gigabytes of data...just the type of data that needs some visualization. JuiceKit to the rescue.

We've put together a pair of visualizations that can make this data accessible to your average non-data-monkey traveler:

• Treemap uses size to represent the number of flights by airline and by point of origin. The color is used to show delay time -- we've got all sorts of delay metrics, each of which tells an interesting story.

• US map uses size to represent the number of flights and the color to display delay time. Filtering by airline yields additional details.

There are some interesting insights that pop-out when you build a visualization this data.

• The different airline strategies are quickly apparent in the treemap. Hub-and-spoke airlines (Delta, Continental) have one or two dominant boxes (origin location), surrounded by lots of small locations. A point-to-point airline like Southwest looks entirely different with lots of similarly sized boxes.

• Flipping between delay types uncovers some unexpected results. For example, you might expect weather delays to be heavily correlated by airport. The data shows something a little different: Comair appears to be abnormally impacted by weather delays -- as if a dark cloud chases around their airplanes. While Comair might be overstating weather delay data to prevent paying for meal vouchers, a more reasonable Wikipedia investigation suggests that Comair flies smaller weather-susceptible Bombardier airplanes.

A few details about this demo for our technical audience:

For those of you following JuiceKit development, this is a demo of some of the newer features available in our open source Juicekit 1.2 distribution, and some of the features that will be coming to the 1.3 version. Treemap styling is now elegant, crisp, and allows for white borders, fixing a couple rendering bugs. There is a new tree-level depth feature that can make it easier to navigate treemaps with lots of layers. The airports map demonstrates a geographic layout built using GeoLayout JuiceKit and Flare components. A major improvement demonstrated by the airline-selector dropdown is the ability to keep nodes consistent between data reloads. This allows us to animate the nodes even though they are generated by our new LiveQuery component.

At the recent Turning Statistics into Knowledge conference (here's a synopsis), I saw The New York Times' Amanda Cox present on how their 25-person design team designs and builds infographics. In my opinion, The New York Times sets the bar for telling stories with data. Amanda, I later found out, is sometimes referred to as the Michael Phelps of Infographics -- presumably for her tendency to win infographics awards, not for getting photographed with a bong.

Here's a infographic from the presentation that I particularly liked:

This chart is a re-examination of the OECD Business Cycle Clock which:

has been designed to better visualize business cycles - fluctuations of economic activity around their long term potential level - and how some key economic indicators interact with the business cycle.

(Flowing Data also took a look at this chart and the other approaches to presenting the same data.)

Amanda's version of this chart is great because it demonstrates what can be done with the under-used scatterplot chart. Scatterplots are effective at presenting the relative performance of a set of things (e.g. product portfolio). Typically they show a snapshot in time; Amanda has added a time dimension without visually overwhelming the user.

As we've done in the past, we wanted to try to recreate a New York Times-style graphic in Excel. Here's how it came out:

We have a few tricks in here to make this Excel chart possible:

• The chart is a scatterplot with smoothed connector lines. A second highlight series displays just values based on the time selection at the top.
• The line chart at the bottom contains a bar chart that keys off of the time selector to help visually display the time range selected.
• All the labels on the chart are extra data series with data labels rather than adding text labels onto the chart. This approach makes it easier to place the points in the appropriate spot and not worry about problems on resizing.
• A simple macro on the "animate" button walks through the data.

You can download the Excel spreadsheet here

We were excited to see that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and his team used our open-source JuiceKit treemap on the recently released Federal IT Spending Dashboard.

While Tim O'Reilly mistakenly gave credit for all the visualizations to Fusion Charts, we know better. A mother always recognizes her baby. I bet Google also recognized their Motion Chart.

Enough complaining about the broken bits of Business Intelligence; it's time to highlight the things that are good and right in the industry. Like most industries, the renewal and innovation occurs at the fringe, beyond the comfort zone of established vendors.

I've created five categories and a catch-all to capture the solutions and companies (not so much technologies) that are leading the next generation of Business Intelligence. The categories are:

• Analyst tools
• Dashboards
• Targeted solutions
• Open-source and free
• Advanced visualizations
• Other stuff

Naturally I've focused on areas of Juice expertise and focus -- not coincidentally, the places where we feel BI has neglected end-users. According to a study by the Business Application Research Center, BI end-user adoption sits at a lowly 8%.

I'm happy to take your suggestions (and update the post) for things I've missed in these categories or for entirely new categories.

Analyst tools

Tools that make it easy for analysts to pull data from multiple sources, analyze, visualize and share it.

Winner: Tableau, the reigning king of visual analytics tools, has added more web-based functionality to allow for online sharing and collaboration.

Runner-up: Good Data has arrived on the market with a web-first platform designed to democratize analytics. I had a chance to get a demo from the management team and was impressed with the ease of use and high-quality data presentation.

Dashboards

"A frequently updated analytical display that is clear and concise" (via a recent post)...and not likely to draw the rage of Stephen Few.

Winner: BonaVista Systems wants to make Excel a "first choice dashboard tool." From the humble position of sparkline plug-in vendor, BonaVista has taken a leadership role in encouraging more effective dashboard design.

Runner-up (tie): Two BI companies, Qlikview and Microstrategy, seem to be following BonaVista's lead. Unfortunately, they may only be dipping in a toe as I found just a couple examples that break from the traditional over-glossy, gauge-riddled dashboard interface.

• Qlikview

• Microstrategy

Targeted solutions

Companies that serve a narrow slice of the BI world extremely well. The desire to be all things to all people has been an Achilles Heel of the BI industry. The general purpose BI platforms often prove too broad and too generic to serve the unique problems of specific industries or functional areas.

Winner: Wall Street on Demand is a brilliant, below-the-radar provider of information solutions to the financial sector. Their sparse, articulate marketing text and few screenshots hint at a company that knows exactly what they do and deliver high-quality BI solutions. I wish I knew more.

Runner-up (multiple): The following are just a few companies that have focused on an industry or functional segment to deliver targeted BI solutions:

• Quantivo for customer behavior analytics
• Visual I|O for pharmaceuticals
• LucidEra for sale pipeline reporting and analytics

Open-source and free

(I know there is a difference.)

Winner: Pentaho offers an open-source end-to-end BI suite that is a competitive alternative to the big-guys. Of course, the implementation it isn't necessarily cheap or easy.

Runner-up: If anything should scare the BI industry, it is the possibility of a Google Analytics model extended into more general data analysis and visualization tools. Google Fusion Tables may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Advanced visualizations

Bringing leading-edge visualization techniques out of academia and into the business world.

Winner: Many Eyes continues to impress with high-quality visualizations. They are easy to create and clean in design and usability. Impress your boss with a slick visualization in your next presentation.

Runner-up (tie): Openviz / Advanced Visual Systems and Panopticon appear to be the two BI vendors battling it out for leadership in advanced visualization solutions. Unlike Many Eyes, these guys lack Tufte-esque sophistication in infoviz design. That said, there is a big difference between creating a one-off New York Times-quality visualization and delivering a toolset that is re-usable in many different situations.

Other stuff to be admired

Free charts with good default design. InetSoft's Style Chart and Google Charts offer free, embeddable charts.

Jargon-free BI marketing. With few exceptions, BI web sites are densely populated with those awful stock-photography people sitting around conference tables (or worse, the ethnically-diverse V-formation marching at you) and meaningless business jargon and techno-babble. I really appreciate Blink Logic's web site with its straight talk and clean, readable design.

Beyond the desktop. RoamBI has a great-looking iPhone application that is designed to "transform your data into insightful, interactive visualizations delivered to the iPhone." It makes the Oracle and Qlikview iPhone apps look old-school.