#Juice30days Fav Five

This month I’ve been following the #Juice30days guide by Juice Analytics to learn more on data visualization. You really should check their cool website and blog and follow the 30 days program. They are doing a great job setting this up. I put my Fav Five content in this post.

1. A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use

This 3-part white paper  gives us best practices and guidelines on how to create and design better dashboards.

Part 1: Foundation helps you identify your target audience, understand what type of dashboard you want to create and why it is valuable to your organization. It concludes guidance regarding how to focus your message on the information and metrics that matter.

Part 2: Structure helps you start on designing your dashboard, including what form it should take, how to design for audience understanding, and what navigation, interactions, and capabilities will make your dashboard useful and engaging.

Finally, Part 3: Information Design dives into the details of interface and information design. You will learn how to lay out your dashboard and best practices for charting and data presentation.

2.  Who is Edward Tufte?

I knew about this guy, but hadn’t read a lot of his work yet. So this story resulted in a very large and expensive Amazon.com visit…

3.  5 Phases of Data Analytics Maturation: Part 1 & 2

I found this article very fun to read since I could plot the stages exactly to the environments at the clients I work(ed) for, especially the Tribal Elders phase, which is – sadly enough – still reality.

In this article the 5 different stages of maturity that information workers go through as they try to become more effective and efficient at consuming and acting on information are explored.

Phase 1: Tribal Elders

Phase 2: Static Reports

Phase 3: Bigger Static Reports

Phase 4: Ad-hoc reports

Phase 5: Experienced Guide

4. Before trying to communicate information, first understand it.

When thinking about information, don’t confuse the medium with the message. Watch it:

5.  30 Resources to Find the Data you Need

Need some data for your latest demo dashboard or report? This list has some nice sources to get you started.

Posted in: Data visualization, Knowledge sharing

Understanding big numbers

Yesterday I saw this picture on my Facebook wall that I have to share with you. It is an easy but extremely powerful example of how you can present the same information in two totally different ways.

Using the big numbers can makes information blurry (which is probably for a reason in this case). People don’t have any real feeling or connection to those billions or trillions besides that it is just a big shitload of money. Transforming these figures to something we can relate to, like our own annual income, makes the numbers understandable again.

Posted in: Data visualization

Better data visualizations in 30 days

Last week I got a nice tip from my colleague Jeroen van der A I want to share with you. He mailed me about this program/challenge by Juice Analytics on data visualization: 30 Days to Context Connection. It is a collection of articles, videos and assignments to build some great visualization skills. I will go through the program and let you know in a few weeks what my favorite content was.

To get you started I posted the video assignment of the first day below. Also I recommend to check out the Juice Analytics website, which is a great resource for business intelligence professionals. It is loaded with examples that should give you some new ideas.

Posted in: Data visualization, Knowledge sharing