From GraphJam.com: Things I Want to Do in New Jersey
Posted by Mike S in Presentation on November 8th, 2009
Might I add “Visit the Axis Group headquarters“? Just kidding, New Jersey people. It was good seeing you last week.
Very amusing (though occasionally vulgar) site.
Book Review: Now You See It
Posted by Mike S in Business Intelligence, QlikView, Reading on November 2nd, 2009
At the beginning of June, Stephen Few released Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis, his first book since 2006’s Information Dashboard Design. Divorced from the strict context of dashboards, it focuses on fundamental techniques for presenting data for analysis. Here is his description from the book cover:
Before you can present information to others, you must know its story. “Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis” teaches simple, fundamental, and practical techniques that anyone can use to make sense of numbers. These techniques rely on something that almost everyone has—vision—using graphs to discover trends, patterns, and exceptions that reside in quantitative information and interactions with those graphs to uncover what the discoveries mean.
Although some questions about quantitative data can only be answered using sophisticated statistical techniques, most can be answered using simple visualizations—quantitative sense-making methods that can be used by people with little statistical training. Until “Now You See It,” no book has taught the basic skills of data analysis to such a broad audience and for so many uses, even though the need is huge, critical, and rapidly growing.
For starters, this book is HUGE, with a larger footprint than Tufte hardcovers and nearly thrice the thickness of Information Dashboard Design, so do not order it, expecting to throw it in your laptop case to take your next trip. I actually laughed when I opened the box from Amazon.
It is organized into large sections on Building Core Skills for Visual Analysis and Honing Skills for Diverse Types of Visual Analysis, with a short section at the end for Further Thoughts and Hopes. The first section is like an extended introduction to data visualization vocabulary, concepts, and patterns, while the second digs into different types of analysis, like time series, part-to-whole, deviation, distribution, and correlation. The structure is logical, and the book flows well, as a result.
Every chapter is beautifully presented and rich with examples that both illustrate Few’s points and help you remember them. Absent the emphasis on dashboards, he has the opportunity to delve deeply into visual representations that are not necessarily well-suited for the precious real estate of executive information systems. So if you have read IDD, don’t worry - there is not a lot of repeat information.
It’s likely that several of the techniques will jump off the page as being applicable to data you have been studying for a long time, but you just have never thought to look at them in the ways described in the book. As you read, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to go to your computer to play, spinning your data to look at them differently.
As you have no doubt heard Few opine, many popular Business Intelligence tools do not possess the out-of-the-box capabilities to present data how he would like, so it was fun to read about some slightly more unusual chart types and figure out how to create them in BI applications that I use. At this point, I don’t think any single piece of software can be expected to encompass every possible representation, though most of the examples in the book can be approximated in Excel.
QlikView whisker plot
I strongly recommend Now You See It to anybody for whom analyzing data is a part of their jobs. I finished reading it months ago, but can still list, off the top of my head, several lessons and ideas I got from the book. Though some of the topics discussed, like geo-spatial analysis, may not be relevant for the data you use at work or the type of analysis you are capable of conducting with your current collection of tools, I can carry on a fifteen-minute conversation about something as universal as usage of bar charts.
For a more representative preview, Few has published an excerpt from Chapter 5, Analytical Techniques and Practices, on his site:
Solutions to the Problem of Over-Plotting in Graphs (PDF)
Several other Visual Business Intelligence Newsletters from 2008 and later also contain lessons and examples that appear in the book.
Bonus: A Graph Design I.Q. Test has been added to the Perceptual Edge site. If you read that site or Few’s books - or even this blog - you should do well.
QlikView mentioned in latest Stephen Few paper
Posted by Mike S in Business Intelligence, QlikView on October 30th, 2009
Fundamental Differences in Analytical Tools: Exploratory, Custom, or Customizable (PDF)
Excerpt from the September/October 2009 Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, by Stephen Few, linked above:
Customizable Analytics Requirements
To build custom analytical applications, you need programming power. The tool ideally exhibits the following characteristics:
• Provides the means to develop an application that supports precisely what’s needed in the most effective way possible. This requires a high degree of programmability, both in terms of power and flexibility.
• Provides ready-made libraries of useful functions that can be easily plugged into the application with much less effort than it would take to build them from scratch.
• Easy and efficient to use by those who develop the applications.
• Provides the means to remove everything from view in the ? nished application that isn’t needed.
• Provides the means to guide the analyst step by step through the process.
• Provides the means to coach the user through the process with instructions and examples, as needed.
One of the products that I’ve seen that seems to do this fairly well is QlikView. You don’t need to be a professional programmer to work with QlikView. Most of what you need exists as ready-made widgets (for example, particular charts with built-in functionality) that can be easily plugged into the developing application and much of the customization is done by selecting the appropriate parameters from lists that are found in dialog boxes. Programming code might need to be written, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
When you’re developing a custom analytical application, you don’t mind wading through lists of parameters in dialog boxes or writing a little code. Unlike the process of analysis itself when you must remain immersed in thinking about the data without distraction, these steps are less disruptive to developers. Although even developers benefit from programming interfaces that keep them focused on the task at hand, what they need most is the ability to do everything that’s needed, precisely and efficiently. Writing code in this case isn’t a distraction, it’s the task itself.
Tools such as QlikView are often handy because they have much of the infrastructure that is often needed for data analysis built right into the product, relieving us of the task of creating it, which in some cases would be virtually impossible. For example, QlikView includes a powerful in-memory management infrastructure that makes it possible for data to be manipulated at extremely fast speeds. This is powerful, because when you move a slider control to filter 100,000 rows of data or you drill from the country to the state level, you want the results of that action to appear without delay.
Please check out the rest of the paper, or subscribe to Stephen Few’s newsletter here.
Support the Axis Revolution team in the City to Shore Ride for Multiple Sclerosis
Posted by Mike S in Announcements on September 21st, 2009
Axis Team,
Just wanted to let you all know that Ken Kuperberg, Tony Rosa, and myself are all riding in a MS-150 bike ride on October 3rd and 4th. We will be biking from Cherry Hill to Ocean City, NJ, on Saturday and then back to Cherry Hill on Sunday. It’s a great ride, and we have been prepping during the week and on the weekends to be able to pull it off.
We are looking to raise $300 each and would appreciate any support you can offer. Because the ride is only two weeks away, we don’t have much time.
If anyone in your family has Multiple Sclerosis, this is a great way to support research that will help them. Please forward to others you know who have friends and relatives confronting MS and let them know of our efforts. If you like to make charitable contributions to good causes, this is a good one. My mother-in-law has MS, and I ride for her.
Thanks,
Mike Mahaney
[Support the Axis Revolution team]
Typography for Lawyers (and pretty much everyone else)
Posted by Mike S in Presentation on September 20th, 2009
Typography for Lawyers is a website created by Matthew Butterick, a Harvard graduate and lawyer with a background in graphic design and typography. (To his credit, his law firm does have a pretty beautiful website.) He dedicates some of his free time to Typography for Lawyers to help those in the legal profession make better typographic decisions.
I can’t think of many industries that do not rely heavily on text, including technical fields, which has been discussed here before. To be clear, typography goes beyond font choice, including size, alignment, case, and anything that contributes to the appearance of text. In Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, it can take the form of written communication, reports, application design - even your comic sans email signature.
A few basic takeaways from Mr. Butterick’s site:
- Typography matters because presentation matters. Design choices affect how your message is conveyed and how easily it is understood, just as your tone of voice and body language do in conversation.
- One space - not two - between sentences. (Evidently, I’ve been doing this incorrectly for a long time.)
- Many things are best used sparingly - bold, italics, all caps, exclamation points.
- Monospace fonts, e.g. Courier, are difficult to read and waste space. They are only necessary for typewriters to work correctly, which likely has little to do with your work.
- The most commonly used fonts on our computers are designed to render well on your monitor, not in print.
There is plenty more detail on the site itself, if the subject interests you. There is likely a void at your company yet to be filled by a typography guru.
For another reading on the topic, see Tufte’s paper, PowerPoint Does Rocket Science.
This typography just screams “Financial Analysis”. (SAP.com)
Fun visualization site: Information is Beautiful
Posted by Mike S in Visualization on August 23rd, 2009
Information is Beautiful
I think I would get along well with the creator of the site, David McCandless, who, on his About page, says, “My pet-hate is pie charts. Love pie. Hate pie-charts.” It’s not surprising that he has written for Wired before - his visualizations look to be very much in the Wired style of infographic. Here is one I saw featured on Lifehacker that could prove useful:
The Buzz vs The Bulge: Caffeine and calories
According to McCandless’ scatter plot, the most bang for your buck in terms of high caffeine and low calories is iced coffee (lower-right of chart), while the worst is a hot chocolate with whipped cream (upper left of chart). I’ll also point out that iced coffee, like regular coffee, is cheaper than espresso-based drinks, and most people are actually capable of making it at home, so it seems like an easy choice.
Another Enterprise win for QlikView
It seems as though QlikView recently scored a big sale with Google, if the number of recruiters pinging me with “an excellent opportunity for you with Google” is any indication. (Sorry, I’m not local to Northern California.)
Kudos to QlikView for continuing to make inroads with large, Enterprise customers.
The book on trellis charts, AKA small multiples
Posted by Mike S in QlikView, Visualization on July 26th, 2009
From pg. 67 of Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information:
At the heart of quantitative reasoning is a single question: Compared to what? Small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful, answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives. For a wide range of problems in data presentation, small multiples are the best design solution.
What are small multiples? Essentially, a small multiple is a series of displays with the same design structure repeated for all the images, arranged in a grid. That means each graph in the series should be the same size and shape, with the same scale, differing only in the data they display.
What are the advantages of using small multiples? On page 29 of Envisioning Information, Tufte says, “An economy of perception results; once viewers decode and comprehend the design for one slice of data, they have familiar access to data in the other slices. As our eye moves from one image to the next, this constancy of design allows viewers to focus on changes in information rather than changes in graphical composition. A steady canvas makes for a clearer pictures.” (If you want to learn more about small multiples, all of chapter four is dedicated to them.)
Unfortunately, most of Tufte’s examples in Envisioning Information, e.g. the proper formation of capital letters, light signals for a train, or Saturn’s orbit, while instructive, are a bit of a stretch to apply to common BI situations. Enter Stephen Few, who always manages to apply Tuftean principles in a way that you can use them at work. From page 159 of Information Dashboard Design:
Concerning their efficiency, a small multiple offers another advantage over a series of individual graphs: the title, legend, and other metadata need to be printed only once to represent the series.
Here, Few uses small multiples to introduce another dimension to the standard grouped bar chart:
Few also offers small multiples up as a method of resolving overplotting in graphs (PDF) (this paper is an excerpt from his excellent new book):
The last example from Stephen Few I’ll mention is that small multiples can be used as “visual crosstabs”. (Of course, it is helpful to have the supporting information available, too, if possible.)
Improve Your Vision (PDF)
A white paper worth reading that covers some of the principles involved when employing small multiples is Three Blind Men and an Elephant: The Power of Faceted Analytical Displays (PDF).
Looking at other examples, the written-in-stone-reliable (cough) Wikipedia’s sample image in the entry for small multiple is not a small multiple, due to the different metrics and scale of vertical axis in each chart.
Another small multiple fail is way back in one of the first posts on this blog, The Trilogy Meter. The problem there is that the graphs are arbitrarily arranged, while they should be in order of magnitude from greatest overall to worst overall trilogy.
My image sample from the QlikView 9.0 Beta - QlikView 9 being the first release to support trellis charts - may not have been a great example of when to use small multiples. They should not be frivolously used in place of every multi-series line graph, containing the same information in merely five times the space. That said, it may be of value if you see small multiples as an alternative to using a list box to toggle through slices of a dimension, due to the way the human memory works, as discussed in the “single context” section of my post about facilitating comparison.
Master the art of working remotely
Posted by Mike S in Productivity on July 12th, 2009
IT people want the flexibility of working remotely to improve their work/life balances, but they have to demonstrate that they can handle the responsibility that comes with it in order to continue to be trusted with that opportunity (read: no daytime television). Gina Trapani, a founding editor of Lifehacker, details how to master the art of working remotely for HarvardBusiness.org, focusing largely on communication:
Email will be the primary means of communicating with your remote worker or manager, so you’ve got to get good at staying on top of your inbox. This is especially important if you’re in different time zones and wake up to new messages sent while you were sleeping and send out a few before your local quitting time
…Not every office uses IM, but when your project requires short bursts of communication or consultation, instant messaging is quicker and more efficient than email.
…Not only can a regular 10-minute phone or Skype call save you time by preempting long email threads, it can also help you touch base in a human way. The sound of your remote manager or freelancer’s voice saying “How was your weekend?” or “Welcome back from your vacation” can go a long way to building an effective working relationship.
Please follow the above link for more detail, including some of the technologies that support said communication.
For Axis Group, we really like GoToMeeting for web conferences and have a VoIP system set up such that when you dial my extension at our New Jersey office, it rings my laptop, wherever that might be. I also use Digsby to aggregate a few IM programs and my work-related Twitter account (sorry, I don’t do recreational tweeting).
Two more resources for seamless switching between different computers at different locations: Xmarks and Evernote. Xmarks is a IE/Firefox/Safari plugin that keeps your bookmarks synced to their server, so you can have your most up-to-date bookmarks available wherever you go. Evernote is a fairly comprehensive program similar to Microsoft OneNote, but it’s free. People use it for everything from managing recipes to personal finance; I use it like a personal Wikipedia. It, too, syncs your notes to their server, so its perfect for to-do lists and other continually updated project information. Both can be accessed on the web, so they’re especially handy when you don’t have the rights to install software on a machine.
My home productivity center
And, found in a From the Tips Box post on Lifehacker, here’s a website that will potentially help if you are trying to provide remote technical support (or if you just want to quickly grab your IP address): SupportDetails.com
