Subscribe

The big picture

Companies must ensure what they see aligns with what they want to see in order to make the correct decisions.

Jessie Rudd
By Jessie Rudd, Technical business analyst at PBT Group
Johannesburg, 29 Aug 2013

While computer-generated visualisation may be a relatively new subject area, it is in no way a new science. Take, for example, an Egyptian Turin Papyrus geological map from 1150BC, the Tabula Peutinger Roman maps from 366-335 BC, Ptolemy's World Map from approximately the second century AD, Su Song's Celestial Atlas from China in 1092 AD, Abraham Ortelius' First Modern Atlas from 1570^1 - visualisation has its roots in a very long and honourable tradition of representing information using pictures.

The combination of art, science and statistics into a visual matrix that is easily understood and consumable by the average person on the street includes the development of maps, astronomy, statistical graphics and computers.

Today, effective and well-designed visualisation has become a very big deal. There are huge amounts of data floating around in any given industry or business, and the tools required to enhance this data are more important than ever. These massive mountains of information require users to employ smart and accurate analysis, lest they become lost in the sea of untamed numbers.

Entangled info

The world of analytics and business is becoming ever more intertwined, and businesses need to have access to fast, 'at a glance' decisioning capabilities. The accurate presentation of the information being mined today is just as important now as it was in Egypt in 1150BC.

Historically, graphical aids for interpreting data have mainly been produced by specialists, statisticians and scientists. However, with the huge increase in the volumes of publically available data, there is an increasing appetite among members of the general public to produce their own visualisations. As a result of this, new tools are being developed daily.

Entry-level tools like Excel, with its cell heat maps, scatter plots and conditional formatting, have given way to much more sophisticated - and free - tools like Google Chart API2, Flot3, Visual.ly4 and Weka5. To varying degrees, these tools contain everything but the kitchen sink. From bar charts and line graphs to maps and even QR codes - these tools are perfect for simple and non-customisable visualisations.

Free to the public, however, licensed to corporations, tools like QlikView* and Tableau7 provide even more variety, power, and more importantly, customisation. These tools enable data from disparate sources to be leveraged into a single application, mobile device analysis and accessibility, cloud storage and analytics. Tools such as these are well on their way to leveraging business intelligence and putting it in the hands of the business user.

Visualisation is meaningless if it is not telling the right story.

All these tools provide the ability to tame data into graphical order. Beautifully designed heat maps, word clouds, data bubbles and chromograms are all very striking and command attention. However, beautiful is not always better. The truth of data must not be lost in the striking gauges, geo-maps and cluttered info of graphics.

A well respected expert whose work has contributed significantly in designing effective data presentations, Edward Tufte, came up with the concept of the 'ink-to-data'** ratio. He argues and teaches that if there are more decorative elements to a graph than actual data, the story of the data becomes lost in the prettiness.

More than legend

At its heart, a business needs to make well backed-up decisions, quickly and easily. Overly busy graphical data may look very informative; however, the right story needs to be told to the right person at the right time, with the right data backing up the story.

Visualisation is meaningless if it is not telling the right story. All too often, practitioners are designing dashboards or reports with lovely graphics that simply don't tell the right story. As such, a business runs a real risk in making bad and ultimately the wrong decisions, unintentionally.

A 'graphical practitioner' can format, colour code and design a dashboard relatively quickly. A brilliant 'graphical practitioner' knows the true value is in the data and that sometimes the numbers need to speak for themselves. Busy, loud and unnecessary graphical design needs to give way to well designed, clean, informative graphics that convey the right message.

More is not always better, and companies need to ensure that what they are seeing is really what they want to see, and that the right 'picture' is being presented in order to make the right decisions.

1Data Art
http://www.data-art.net/resources/history_of_vis.php
2Google Developers
https://developers.google.com/chart/
3Flot
http://www.flotcharts.org/
4Visual.ly
http://visual.ly/
5Weka 3
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
*Harness the Power of your Data with QlickView
http://www.qlikview.co.za/?m=1
7Tableau Software
http://www.tableausoftware.com/
8The work of Edward Tufte and Graphic Press
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
** Data - Ink Ratio
http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php/Data-Ink_Ratio

Share