
Taking Data Visualization from Eye Candy to Efficiency - bootload
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150922-data-points-visualization-eye-candy-efficiency/
======
jalfresi
My personal problem with these types of charts that they attempt to present
the "raw" data and expect me to sift through it to find the interesting stuff.
It is my understanding that originally bar charts and their like we're used to
illustrate visually a specific point from a set of data. This no longer seems
to be the case these days. Instead we get an article about "mass migrations of
people across the globe" and a visual dump of all the data, like I'm expected
to find the interesting story in all this! Why not write about specifics and
illustrate that with a traditional chart?

I have similar issues with admin systems or management dashboards (having had
to write loads of them over the years). I've found that executive users would
much rather see a bar chart even if the bar chart doesn't display data of any
significance, than see numbers. They would much rather see a partial non-story
be displayed if it meant the visual display and layout of the dashboard was
consistent than see two significant numbers. For example, imagine a dashboard
that shows performance figures for sales. I've often been asked to show what
is usually a static screen layout of bar charts etc that doesn't tell the user
anything import rather than show 2 or 3 stand out figures I.e. Sales are down
over last month in a big red call-out vs a bar chart that shows all sales
figures for all regions compared to last month which requires the user to
determine if the overall sales are down on last month.

There seems to be a large disconnect between the purpose of the visual display
of quantative data and the action required or message being delivered. I
actually put a lot of this down to excel; I've seem countless spreadsheets
contain a graph that tells you nothing of significance because the person
writing the spreadsheet doesn't understand that there are values of
significance in their data. It's like the expect the graph to tell them the
story (whilst this is true in some circumstances, I've only really seen this
work when the data is obviously significant. Countless times I've see than
overall trends can be missed because the use of data is incorrect, and then
the wrong type of chart is used to display the data "to look nice in the
report")

Anyway that's my main beef with these types of visualisations; they always
come across as a kind of "there is far too much data here for us to sift
through and find anything of importance so to examine. Let's create a tool
that lets th user do the work". Unfair? Probably. Busy? Definitely. Pretty?
Absolutely. Useful? Debatable.

~~~
aunty_helen
I think part of the problem is, when you're working on the data so closely you
lose the outsider perspective and things which you think jump out and are
relatively easily divulged actually require a deeper understanding only
obtained from an in depth analysis. I guess it's a bit of a catch 22.

