Data Visualisation: the Path to Understandability
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DATA VISUALISATION: THE PATH TO UNDERSTANDABILITY Olof Schybergson Paul Kahn CEO, Fjord Managing Director, Kahn+Associates [email protected] [email protected] 2 CONTENTS WHY DATA VISUALISATION MATTERS A Fjord Report examining How service design is being influenced by new current thinking, future paradigms in data and information display developments, and how Understanding data visualisation – the context organisations can harness Information as a commodity the power of effective Data and information overload data visualisation Big data sets – but small screens The rules of successful data visualisation apply to consumer and corporate products alike WHAT ARE THE KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL DATA VISUALISATION? The tools and techniques that make a difference Information dashboards Actionable information Above: An application for building deployment plans The social factor for software projects (top) and aligning projects and events to a single calendar (bottom) by Kahn+Associates. Real-time information Managers in an international corporation are able to see Dynamic information the projects that will affect their division during specific time periods. THE WAY AHEAD What the future holds – and how to plan for it www.fjordnet.com 3 INTRODUCTION Data and information are everywhere. More than methods of distinguishing the data they deliver to fill Fjord believes that struggle towards ever, we are constantly connected to a world in our insatiable need for ‘understandability’. understandability should be actively shaped by which anything from news stories, TV and video service design practice, user insight, and interface content, financial transactions, search results, and However, at present there are only a limited number design. The way in which these disciplines email, Skype, Twitter and Facebook messages crowd of genuinely useful and effective tools that help users interconnect is a crucial part of the puzzle. the screens before our eyes on a growing range of to understand and deal with the huge quantities of devices. information that wash over them every day. Why? This Fjord Report explores our current thinking in this sector. We look at opportunities and threats Yet the more data we have glowing on our screens The solution is not a matter of graphic style or for innovative organisations ready to embrace data the more puzzling it becomes. The enormity of this taste. Pretty, handsomely designed information is visualisation techniques, and offer our thoughts information flow contributes to a numbing barrage still useless if it’s not understood. We need data on the impact of future developments across the of complexity. visualisation to help us see patterns and trends, service design community. differences and distances – this is how our minds In the corporate world, things are no different: for a transform data into information. Interface and recent IBM survey of 1500 global leaders – people at service designers are now starting to understand the the top of the information chain – complexity was crucial importance of this aspect of user experience. cited as the most significant issue facing managers and executives today. Successful businesses will build understandability Pretty, handsomely designed into their growing information flow by: information is still useless if it’s To benefit from this huge growth of data, • choosing the story they need to tell, not understood organisations today need to find ways to make their • identifying the dimensions they need to com- data content more understandable, and therefore municate, more valuable than the rest. As the new world of • making use of the appropriate data visualisation ubiquitous connectivity takes shape, businesses that techniques for each dimension. want to thrive will have to find new patterns and www.fjordnet.com 4 Story: When is the least LATCH & Understandability expensive time to travel? Richard Wurman coined the acronym LATCH to capture the Dimensions: Departure- organising principles that make arrival stations, date, information understandable. LATCH stands for Location, Alphabet, cost, cost threshold Time, Category and Hierarchy. Data visualization: These are the techniques users Calendar + colour already understand. Wurman illustates this by showing how a Above: Richard Saul Wuman, three ways of organizing group of dog breeds can be made dog breeds, Information Anxiety 2 (2001). understandable by organising them in different ways: alphabetically by name, using country of origin as category, chronologically by the time they were admitted to the American Kennel Club, or hierarchically by weight in pounds Above: Calendar interface for train ticket purchase from Paris to Bordeaux, Voyages-SNCF.com. www.fjordnet.com 5 WHY DATA VISUALISATION MATTERS How service design is being UNDERSTANDING AND of what is ‘right’ should be built upon user insight influenced by new paradigms in combined with flexible user interface concepts and a DATA VISUALISATION – mastery of visual communication. data and information display THE CONTEXT Increasingly businesses are working with sets of Simple examples of data visualisations include information that include user interactions such as showing time over distance, or produce type by contributions, visits, or transactions. In these cases cost, or temperature and rainfall over time. we can now quantify and cluster interactions to But showing restaurants by a mixture of attributes make visible items that attract common focus. Our simultaneously, such as type of food, cost, location systems can create list of the items most users like, and impact on your social life, is more challenging. posts most commented, stories most emailed, and so on. We can apply user insight studies to map out The two-fold goal of data visualisation is to allow the the relevant attributes of the book, the hotel, the viewer to: restaurant, the movie for our target audiences. How • understand information rapidly, should we combine these presentations with the • understand connections and relationships best new social dimensions and real-time location that conveyed through visual means. mobility affords? Attaining this double goal of rapid visual understandability is not limited to turning text and numbers into charts. In the broad sense we present here, data visualisation is the path to understandability – the right story told by using the right visualisation techniques for the right dimensions. The choice www.fjordnet.com 6 At the same time social networks and real-time location data are adding to complexity, the general public’s growing familiarity with interactive systems has opened up new opportunities for data visualisation in storytelling. The static information graphic in journalism, science and finance, used to explain complex information since the nineteenth century is giving way to interactive graphics that give the reader control of what he wants to explore. Information that was once presented in an entire atlas is now accessible in a single Flash application on a web page or a mobile app. Pioneering efforts by The New York Times in the United States and The Guardian in the UK have invited readers to explore the complex information behind the national budget or immigration policy. Their growing success demonstrates the public’s ability and desire to gain a greater understanding by interacting with information. This expanding focus on multi-dimensional information and data visualisation will be a key Immigration Explorer by Matthew Bloch and Robert concentrations in major cities, the predominant origin in attribute for those companies and organisations that Gebeloff for the New York Times gives the reader access each county, the variety of origins around San Francisco are most agile in the emerging world of convergent to 110 years of immigration statistics for the United Bay, and the distribution of immigrants born in El devices, interfaces, and services. States at the county level. Through interaction, we can Salvador. see (clockwise, starting on the top left) the immigrant www.fjordnet.com 7 INFORMATION AS A COMMODITY The great strength of digital information – promise to personalise, filter and socialise the user’s and simply aggregate. The recent Sky News tablet its interoperability across applications, its experience by grabbing headlines from everywhere. application illustrates this approach, giving the user ‘searchability’ and accessibility across media – leads a wealth of data visualisation tools. The view can see to the commoditisation of data. Examples of this trend on the web, tablet and mobile stories in a timeline, by topic, live or pre-recorded, phone include techmeme.com, google reader, in windows or full-screen, or contextualised with a Today, data that a business once controlled can Flipboard, Pulse, Flud, and Taptu, all of which variety of unique graphic and editorial content. easily be syndicated, aggregated, replicated and capitalize on the narrowing distinction between recontextualised. A successful business will need to media-driven and user-driven content and the Investing in effective data visualisation is a add unique value to their data to maintain control of openness of the Internet media field – where the commoditisation remedy for content creators and their market position. cost of entry is low. owners. In print news and magazine layout, a headline As these aggregators gain popularity, media brands serves as the index into the story: the attractor, or may feel that they have to make their content tip of the iceberg. Traditional news