Category: Visualization

  • Recommended reading for December

    Recommended reading December is always an interesting month. Analysts, software companies and journalists post a ton of predictions, reviews and opinions to celebrate the start of the new year. 2012 is not different. Here are a a few posts that I highly recommend reading. Most influential visualizations Tableau Software without a doubt knows a lot…

  • Inspiration from Stephen Few

    Greetings from San Francisco. I am back here to attend Osisoft’s vCampus developer conference. The conference kicked off with a true highlight: Stephen Few delivered one of the keynote presentations. Hopefully, all of you know Stephen and the awesome work he has done over the past years. Today’s presentation was content-rich and also very entertaining.…

  • A few thoughts about gauge charts

    Gauge charts A few days ago, I had a discussion about gauge charts. A colleague and I had reviewed a collection of operational dashboards. Some of them contained large sets of gauge charts. Those dashboards were the most ineffective. At the risk of repeating myself, here are some thoughts about gauge charts. Gauge charts are not necessarily…

  • 5 lessons for using dashboard colors appropriately – Part 2

    Selecting dashboard colors Last week, I wrote about the role of colors in photographs. A lot of the insights apply to the design of solid management dashboards and reports. Color choice does make a huge difference. So, let’s apply the ideas from the prior post and apply them to your performance dashboards, charts and reports:…

  • Dashboard color – Yes, it does matter! The basics – Part 1

      Dashboard color? Have you ever paid much attention to dashboard color and its effect on people? Colors are very powerful but very few of us actively leverage that to create awesome performance dashboards and reports. Just take a look at some examples that are floating around many organizations. Screens often induce headaches and are…

  • How to confuse and distract your audience with poor visualizations

    Excuse me? We often talk about how to best visualize data so that the audience can quickly discover the most important information in often complex data sets. But we cannot forget that it is also possible to achieve exactly the opposite effect: You can also leverage visualizations to distract and confuse people. As a matter…

  • An Easter Egg hunt with three charts

    It’s that time of the year. Millions of kids are excited about hunting for Easter Eggs. Why not do the same here on the blog? Below are three charts. All of them are colored according to the season. But there are some problems with each one of the charts. Can spot them? Scroll down to…

  • Why stacked line charts are useful

    Stacked line charts Stacked line charts are a great and yet simple tool. Here is why. We often run into a situation where we need to analyze data with different units of measure. Think about  a classic but yet simple situation: Vital company data such as revenue, margin % and expenses is used to obtain…

  • Watch that chart aspect ratio!

    The chart aspect ratio The other day I reviewed a dashboard. It looked great. But there was a chart on the bottom that just did not make any sense. It was way too long and stretched out. As a result, it was very difficult to use it appropriately. And that reminded me: We have to…

  • Freedom to think?

    Change that viewpoint Last summer I participated in a Bavarian wedding. As a photographer I was really excited to see three traditional alphorn players. The early results looked good on the camera monitor (left photo). At that point I was tempted to pack up and celebrate with my friends. But I resisted and began to…