We are shameless magpies here at Thunderfly, and so I am never happier than when passing on a tool or tip that I think people might find useful.  And so it is that I'd like to highlight a tool which Warren and I have mentioned during our courses, but not yet on the blog - the Junk Charts Trifecta.

The interior decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink that does not tell the viewer anything new. The purpose of decoration varies — to make the graphic appear more scientific and precise, to enliven the display, to give the designer an opportunity to exercise artistic skills. Regardless of its cause, it is all non-data-ink or redundant data-ink, and it is often chartjunk.

The blogger behind Junk Charts, Kaiser Fung, has said he aims to recycle the chart junk he encounters into junk art. The blog showcases the occasions on which heinous crimes against data visualisation are brought to his attention, and he does his best to extract the meaning (like sunlight from a cucumber, as Farquarson would have it) and display it in a more meaningful way.  

Now, we've covered checklists (including one from the estimable Stephen Few, which Warren put to good use) before, but Fung has developed this triangular checklist, which he calls the Trifecta, and which might conceivably be easier on the eye if you print it and put it up by your desk.  Successful data visualisations have all three elements in harmony, and Fung checks both the original visualisations, and the ones he develops to replace them, to ensure they meet the criteria.

You can address the three elements in any order, but perhaps it makes sense to start at the top and ask what the question being asked is - what question is the data answering?  This was something mentioned by John Kay in his series of superhero recommendations.  You could be overstepping the mark if you use data to assert something that it doesn't actually show.

The second point of the triangle asks what the data says.  This is the section where your expertise or area of interest guides you to pick out the important information that you wish to communicate.  It is hard to offer concrete guidance in this area; this is where we remind you that you are the expert, and to have the confidence in the decisions you make.

Finally, the trifecta asks you to check whether the chart or figure you've designed communicates both of those aspects.  If all of these three elements are working for you, you're onto a winner.

Last week, I talked about the lizard brain, and the way it tempts you to follow the line of least resistance whenever you encounter a challenge, or try to do something new.  This week, I’d like to suggest one way that you can break out of your normal routine, by reverting to what Warren and I call one of the ‘tools of the trade’ – pen and paper.

It is easy to start a project – presentation, report or figure – by switching on the computer and opening up a familiar piece of software.  The first thing that many people do when preparing a presentation is open up Powerpoint, and click onto those inviting text boxes: title here; bullet points go here.  Copy and paste the slides from the last presentation you gave, tweaking the date and venue on the title page.

 But when you fall into this pattern, the medium takes over, and it becomes more important than the message you’re trying to get across.  When you find yourself going onto autopilot, it’s a great chance to stop, reflect, and go analogue – get out paper and pens.

Paper allows you the chance to really explore what it is you’re trying to achieve, before you get bogged down in the technicalities of making that happen.  We often ask people on our courses to have a go at drawing a figure which shows data that we’ve given them, with only some coloured pens and A1 paper.  They’re often uncomfortable at sacrificing accuracy, but going analogue provides them with a chance to think through the decision-making process of which data to focus on, and how to present it most effectively.  Those are the key concerns, rather than worrying about how to get the chart wizard to show what you want.

Getting out a pen and paper also stimulates bits of your brain that might otherwise be neglected; research suggests that writing by hand has a powerful impact on the parts of your brain involved with cognitive processing and working memory, and using techniques such as drawing pictures or mindmapping can help you see new connections, highlight priorities and can also suggest new ways of communicating your message. 

Once you start adding in coloured pens and post-it notes, you can really embrace the flexibility and creativity of going analogue.  And we practice what we preach!  Planning for our most recent course (contact us if you’d like to know more, or book us to help your organisation) looked like this:

The concept of your lizard brain is one that Warren has mentioned before, but it was brought home to me, repeatedly and painfully, over the weekend.  Having happily left my stabilisers behind 25 years ago, I spent last weekend in Wales, relearning how to ride a bike. I wanted to get to grips with riding off road, going downhill and over rocks, roots and even jumps. 

I’d love to pretend this is me, but it really isn’t. Photo by Dave Cheeseman.

The mantra of the weekend was ‘brakes are not your friend’; the idea is to reduce your speed when you approach an obstacle, then release the brakes while actually riding over it.  This sounds straightforward, until your lizard brain takes over.  I approached a small step and released my brakes as instructed. The front wheel dropped and the back wheel followed, by which time I was going a bit quick, and my lizard brain leapt in, jamming on my front brakes as hard as I could.  Over the handlebars I went, in what was – apparently – a spectacular yet graceful encounter with the ground. 

The term ‘lizard brain’ was coined by Seth Godin, to describe the resistance we all encounter when we try to do something challenging.  The lizard brain is a remnant from our evolution, and it wants us to make life as easy as possible.  It wants us to be warm, fed, comfortable and preferably not being chased by large predators.  When we’re not in a survival situation, the lizard brain still has an impact, but now the drive is to make life comfortable and to avoid modern difficulties or hazards.  This weekend, the lizard brain kept yanking on my brake levers.  When you’re presenting data, the lizard brain makes you put this year’s numbers into a chart or table that you originally designed last year, or the year before.  After all, nobody complained, so it must have been alright. 

The lizard brain suggests that you stick to using slides you’ve prepared from previous presentations.  It makes you revert to using bullet points and complex diagrams that take ages to explain.  And the lizard brain always says that, because your colleagues think it’s OK to take an hour to prepare for a 30 minute presentation, you can only spend that amount of time too. 

We all do it.  We set out with the best intentions: this time, I’m going to redesign this data and make it really shine; this time, I’m going to ride with the brakes off; and the lizard brain pops up.  But if you want to overcome your lizard brain, here are three things that I’ve taken away from my weekend on a bike, and that you could bear in mind when you need to overcome the resistance to visualising your data or preparing your presentation differently.

1.  It’s uncomfortable

Your instinct is to be cautious, to not make yourself a target for criticism, to do what’s universally accepted.  This is, of course, totally sensible.  So when you’re trying to do something new, expect it to feel awkward.

2.  It takes time

Habits, whether working habits, or the habits of a lifetime (so far) of riding a bike, take time to break.  It also takes time to learn new habits.  Try and factor that time in, whether it is blocking off some time in your diary to look at good examples elsewhere, to finding images, or to make sure you put aside as much time as you can to prepare a presentation.

3.  It brings its own rewards

Yes, it feels awkward, or difficult to justify to colleagues.  Yes, it doesn’t come naturally, especially when you’re changing long-standing habits.  But yes, it does feel good when you’re able to fight back and overcome your lizard brain.  Not just achieving whatever it was you wanted to do: design a new approach to communicating numbers; give an excellent presentation; get that funding; but also knowing that you’ve had to consciously decide to do things differently.

A search for 'Worst Infographic Ever' reveals a crowded field jockeying for the honour of ultimate sacrilege against Tufteism data presentation. Infographics are *not* something I had planned to cover on this blog - the time and skills required to produce one are far in excess of those available to most people looking for the best way to present their data. I also like to offer friendly, constructive advice on data presentation. Having said all that the latest dumb-shell from Microsoft (albeit not the first) is too rant-worthy to pass over. More importantly, it also offers an extreme reminder of the importance of simplicity in everyday data presentation:

Remarkably, all of this bar-loney is put in the shade by the "57% Email" (probably the first thing you noticed on the graphic) hovering over CloudWorld's sun, as the question it seemingly answers floats off into the heavens. Even in the unlikely event of sun-rays becoming a credible means of displaying data, there are still three major flaws:

• the survey answers are ranked in no discernible order
• having to turn one's head to read content is unacceptable. Text should be horizontal because *this is the way we read*. Remember the Microsoft sun next time you label an axis.
• most staggering of all, the 57% email figure displayed so prominently compared to the others *isn't even the highest figure* - 58% of respondents are using cloud computing for 'servers'. This is an extreme example of how one can include all the data while heavily skew what the reader perceives on the page/screen (perhaps in this case, for commercial reasons).

OK, enough with the unloading on Microsoft, let's nerd this up with a five-minute Thunderfly redesign:

Straight away, the reader can see that servers and email are *both* well out in front as usages of cloud computing. Scanning down the list, the reader can quickly see the most and least common usages and easily pull out any data of particular interest to them, and not obstructed by the heavy editorialising of the author (of course, the author will always decide which data is to be displayed, but those decisions must be credible).

Now, I am not (yet) living in a nerd bubble. I realise that while my worthy bar chart displays the information in a clear manner, it may not contain quite the level of marketing pizazz Microsoft are looking for. So by all means, Microsoft, continue with CloudWorld as a backdrop (even if it does look strangely familiar), but don't let it get in the way of your data.

And for us mere mortals who don't have money to burn on fancy infographics, Microsoft's latest disaster is a testament to the wider perils of putting form before function.

(Hat-tip to 2toria for originally posting the infographic).

Despite the holiday mood, there's still plenty of financial news about; the UK, Europe and the USA continue to make headlines, while they grapple with the ongoing economic slump.  I was prompted to think of this by a posting from a friend on Facebook, who was trying to put the numbers of the recent American budgetary wranglings into a comprehensible context:

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget.

• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385

Making the broader economic context accessible is really important; all of us are affected by the financial turmoil, so broadcasters, analysts and commentators have to make considerable efforts to get the public interested in the numbers behind the doom-laden headlines. Warren and I often remind people who come on our courses that if you're using a figure, it needs to do something that a simple table can't do (this was also something I mentioned in an earlier post here).  The Economist's 'Daily Chart' blog has taken a number of approaches to show different pieces of the financial picture, and they obviously subscribe to the same rules, as they often use tables, both online and in the printed publication. Here's one from earlier this month.

At the other end of the scale, the Economist's team also produce interactive graphics (something that their colleagues on the print edition aren't able to do), allowing the audience to explore the numbers intuitively.  In their post "Owe dear", the table above is supplemented with a clickable world map. The colour of each country demonstrates each country's debt, as a percentage of their GDP.  Colours are used in an immediately understandable way, going from green (not too bad), through orange, to red (oh dear indeed, particularly from a UK point of view).  Rolling over each country shows the percentage in number terms, and clicking through shows a time series of debt across a number of categories. Some of those graphs come with a health warning - they're stacked line charts, so are tricky to read (as Warren commented in his post on stacked bar charts), and they don't all start from the same year (the UK data goes to 1987, while Germany's numbers start in 1991 and France's in 1994, with no explanation as to why), but there's a lot of information, presented in an attractive and engaging way, enabling comparisons to be made, or suggesting connections - look, debt increases in all categories, Government debt doesn't change too much, financial debt increases enormously compared to household debt - in a way that would be less likely with separate charts.

But for a completely different approach to making the big economic picture comprehensible, there's still nothing quite like the short animation created by Nigel Holmes.  Called "The Surplus and the Debt", this isn't the sort of approach that is open to everyone, but it does show another way of adding context to the big numbers being bandied around.  It opens a conversation about the numbers - and at the end of the day, that's what anyone who is presenting data or information really wants, isn't it?

Last week, I said that knowing a bit about how human perception works can help you to make your data presentation more effective. This week, I want to consider that process in practical terms, with the help of one of the great thinkers, writers and practitioners in the dark arts of data visualisation, Stephen Few.  Few has written a useful article on ‘Data Visualisation for Human Perception’ for the online encyclopedia of interaction design, where he poses a question that anyone designing a chart, graph or figure should ask themselves – “Why am I doing this?”

Now I’m not asking you to resort to existential philosophy (drop me a line if you’d like to chat existentialism), but Few distinguishes between the visualisation work you do in order to understand or analyse your information, and the way that you present and communicate that information to others.  You often use the same tools and skills to explore data as you do to present it, but the aim, and therefore the approach, differs, so your first answer to Few’s question should be "I'm exploring my data!" or "I'm communicating this information to others!".  

If you’ve established that you are designing a figure to communicate with others, you need to clarify exactly what it is you wish to communicate, and to keep that aim in mind.  It’s important to spend some time thinking about this, particularly if you’re familiar with your data, and especially if you’re the expert on it.  Few also talks about a step in the design process which is often rushed or overlooked, where you check that what you’ve designed actually meets your aim, either on your own assessment, or by checking with a colleague, friend or family member.  Few’s example is to try and communicate the primary causes of death for Americans in a particular year.  He sets out a five point checklist that his figure needs to meet:

1. Clearly indicates how the values relate to one another, which in this case is a part-to-whole relationship - the number of deaths per cause, when summed, equal all deaths during the year.
2. Represents the quantities accurately.
3. Makes it easy to compare the quantities.
4. Makes it easy to see the ranked order of values, such as from the leading cause of death to the least.
5. Makes obvious how people should use the information - what they should use it to accomplish - and encourages them to do this.

He uses a popular figure – a pie chart – and checks against his list.  His assessment is that it fails on three of his five criteria, so back he goes to the drawing board, and tries again, this time with a bar chart.  This time, it’s five out of five, so it’s a success.  He provides a detailed analysis of why his first figure failed, and the second succeeded, and it’s worth having a read of the kinds of things you might want to consider when you’re reviewing your own visualisations.  Few's article also considers some of the tips and tricks for using our understanding of human perception, such as Gestalt, which we discussed last week.  

Few also reminds us that there may be occasions when using a table of numbers is what’s needed to communicate your message, for times when you want to communicate precise numbers, or for completeness.  But, as Warren discussed in his post last week, tables often lack the ability to get across the bigger message, the trends, the outliers.  So when you’re designing a chart or graph, the final answer to the question “Why am I doing this?” should be “Because a table just won’t do”.

Humans are predisposed to notice patterns (the whole) before noticing its constituent parts.

This phrase from Nicola's post on Gestalt and the role of the familiar in perception came to mind when Guido Fawkes unearthed this gem from Guardian Media Group's (GMG) annual report.

One of the most established patterns - in the Western world, at least - is to read across the page from left to right. When we display time in a figure, we adopt this convention to move chronologically across the page.

An alternative convention, most often used in tables but also some figures, is to read from top to bottom. Again, we can use this when displaying time, moving from oldest at the top to most recent at the bottom.

These conventions have been somewhat scrambled by GMG in a horizontal bar chart showing revenue since 2007:

This isn't in itself problematic. The difficulty is caused by inverting the convention for displaying a time-series, producing a curious effect: whether one reads left to right or from top to bottom we are presented with an increasing set of numbers and - strikingly - increasing bar sizes.

From our experience we know this pattern suggests an *increase* over time which, for company revenue, is 'a good thing'.  Many readers will skim read the report and be left with the impression GMG is in rude health. I humbly suggest that this is somewhat wide of the mark.

Guido's redesign using a vertical bar chart better illustrates the story of falling revenue:

Here, we are presented with another familiar pattern rather more consistent with the data: a clear, continuous *downwards* trend. Somehow, things seem a lot worse on this redesign, even though the data is the same.

Make no mistake, there are far worse crimes of data presentation: no facts have been *omitted* from the original figure: it does show that revenue fell from £593.9m in 2007 to £255.1m in 2011. Instead, the facts have been *obscured* by the mixing up of established conventions, producing a familiar pattern which misleads the casual reader.

The example shows the importance of Nicola's quote at the top of the page. When we produce a figure, we tap into our reader's pre-programmed pattern recognition before they read the detail. This affects how the data is perceived, whether we intend it to or not. In this case, we're left with the impression - however unfair - of a designer attempting to sweeten a rather bitter pill with some clever graphics.

[Thanks to Guido Fawkes for a super-fast reply to my request for the images used in this post.]

UPDATE: thanks to pynt0 in the comments for spotting that there's an error in the redesign: the '11 bar looks like it's showing 225 rather than the correct 255.

When you’re thinking about presenting or communicating your information, it helps to begin with an understanding of how humans perceive and understand things.  Warren and I cover this in the courses we run, and we do our best to start from robust and well-researched psychological hypotheses.  A good example of this is the Gestalt theory of perception, which proposes that humans are predisposed to notice patterns (the whole) before noticing its constituent parts.

Start from the brain! Photo from Patrick Denker, Flickr Creative Commons

So one of the most interesting articles I’ve read about designing presentations comes from a senior psychologist, recently of UCLan, Dr Chris Atherton.  Chris’s blog often has interesting reflections on how her research interests overlap with developments in learning design, and her presentation at the beginning of this year to the Learning Technologies conference draws many of her conclusions together.

Chris introduces the notion that memory is intrinsically unreliable, and that if we want our presentations or information to be memorable, we need to help our audience with whatever assistance we can offer. Chris suggests that a schema, that is, a story or rule of thumb, helps us to ‘hang’ information on an existing framework.  This is the concept which underpins those articles suggesting you imagine travelling a familiar route (home to work, for example), ‘hanging’ an item you need to remember at a landmark.  Then when you reimagine that route later (in the supermarket, for example), you think, ah yes! I’m passing Mecca Bingo, that means I need to buy onions.

Chris also suggests that memory rapidly becomes overloaded in traditional presentations, as presenters ask their audience to take in large quantities of information from both the presenter themselves speaking, and their slides.  So, her tips are to reduce the amount of information you hope to impart to an audience, and to ‘hang’ it on a schema to help your audience retain it.

Chris demonstrated the efficiency of this approach in her experiments in learning design with her own students. She reduced the demands placed on her students by her choice of delivery methods (so, no slides covered with multiple bullet points, tiny writing or difficult to interpret graphs), thereby freeing their cognitive processes to focus on the content of the lectures being delivered by her as presenter.  Her results show conclusively that designing visual aids to complement what she was saying (rather than compete with it for her students’ attention) led to them retaining more information from her lectures.  Happy lecturer, happy students.

If you get a chance, do download Chris’s slides from Slideshare; they’re posted with a text commentary as, following her own rules, the slides don’t tell the whole story – the presenter does that.  But in any case, it’s worth remembering: help your audience to remember what you’re trying to get across, by limiting the amount of information you’re trying to communicate, and by providing a memorable approach, such as a story or rule of thumb.

(download)

Click here to download:

presenting-data-a-short-reading-list-jfpIozwHqAtoiivmBJya.zip (32 KB)

Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

A genuine classic: very influential book which set the terms for the clear and accurate presentation of data. Tufte delivers his treatise on how to present (and occasional polemic on how not to) with wry humour, clarity and a pile of inspirational examples.

The design of the book is part of its success: figures are integrated into the main text, treating them as part of our writing helps ensure that our figures have clear purpose and relevance to our argument. Tufte also has a great website including a stack of 'notebooks', high quality discussion boards around data presentation techniques.

Tufte: UoN library

Chip & Dan Heath: Made To Stick A jewel in the endless conveyor belt of pop-science/psychology books, Made To Stick provides great advice on communicating our ideas in engaging and memorable ways. Crucially, the book is extremely well referenced, often from the academic literature, so it conveys a credibility often lcaking in the genre. Essential.

Martha Davis: Scientific Papers & Presentations

While the data presentation literature has grown in recent years, there is, as yet, little sign of its influence filtering into mainstream academia. This Davis book, first published in 1996, remains the key text for students wanting to improve their communication skills. As well as a section on figures, it includes essential advice on communication in a range of contexts: conferences, posters, writing papers, academic proposals and more. While being aimed at the scientific community, most of the content is highly relevant to anyone in academia.

Davis: UoN library

Local Government Unit Wales: A Guide To Presenting Data

Highlighted earlier on the blog, this short, sharp guide strips back the business of creating tables and figures to their bare essentials. So useful to have this on hand at all times. There's a full list of guides produced by the Unit here.

Inspired by the homemade visualisation set (see below), attendees at today's session on "Presenting Data and Information" at the University of Nottingham received this beautiful (!) hand-drawn cribsheet, outlining some guidelines for putting together tables and charts.  Any views on how useful this is (and how it compares to the earlier typewritten version, available on the blog) would be well-received!