Juice Analytics Combined Feed

Juice's Simple Font Framework

2009-11-03T19:38:37Z

The following is an excerpt from our three-part series: "A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use". It is chock full of best practices and practical tips for designing dashboards. This particular nugget is something we've used to great effect and wanted to make sure our readers didn't miss out simply because they were afraid of ending up on our mailing list. There is even a movie version.

We’d like to offer a simple framework for effective use of fonts in your dashboard. With a few simple decisions, you can ensure that the text on the dashboard will both look good and communicate effectively. The majority of text on the page falls into four categories:

Body text is clean, readable content
Headers separate and name major sections of your work
Notes describe additional things the reader should be aware of. These should fade into the background unless we call attention to them.
Emphasis text is what we want our reader to pay particular attention to.

The following table describes an approach for deciding how to display each of these text types. The yellow highlights indicate where you need to make decisions.

It comes down to three basic decisions:

Choose size and font of the body text
Decide if the header is going to flip to serif or sans-serif—and whether it is going to have any style
Decide what to do about emphasis—color or (bold or italic)

A few things things don't fit neatly into one of the four text categories listed above, such as table headers and graph titles. We tend to use a combination of styles to handle these exceptions.

Stick to this framework and we guarantee your dashboard will look better. Take a look at this example, starting with a standard-looking Excel report without out much thought put toward the fonts:

The following version of the same report cleans up the table, chart, and fonts:

A final version uses Georgia for the title font and brings in a new emphasis color. The result: a totally different but equally clean and readable report.

Designing Great Dashboards - Part 3

2009-10-15T07:44:54Z

Several weeks ago we published Part 1: Foundation of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use, and a couple of weeks after that we released Part 2: Structure. Today, we're making Part 3: Information Design available for download. In this part, we provide practical tips for putting information on the page in a way that communicates effectively to your audience.

If you've already registered, you will be receiving this volume automatically via email. However, if you've been waiting for "a better deal", you're in luck. Right now, you can download all three parts for FREE! That's right, free. As in $0. And we're waiving the shipping and handling charges as well. Just click here to register and get your copy today!

(For those of you who are paying attention, we didn't actually charge for the first two parts either. They've always been free, but sometimes folks need to feel like they're getting a good deal. If you really want to give and get free stuff, check out freecycle.org - through it's "reuse" charter, it helps our environment by keeping good stuff out of the landfill.)

Thanks again for reading!

Airline and Airport Traffic and Delays: A JuiceKit Visualization Demo

2009-09-28T10:05:45Z

To fly is to be frustrated. If you've been traveling for long, you no doubt have your opinions about what airlines and airports are the biggest sources of suffering. Whether it is weather delays, getting stuck on the tarmac due to air traffic, maintenance problems, or missing a connection, it all feels outside of your control.

But a little knowledge can help. The Bureau of Transportations has maintained a giant database of air traffic information for decades of flights -- point of origin, flight times, flight delays, type of delay, etc. It is 72 gigabytes of data...just the type of data that needs some visualization. JuiceKit to the rescue.

We've put together a pair of visualizations that can make this data accessible to your average non-data-monkey traveler:

Treemap uses size to represent the number of flights by airline and by point of origin. The color is used to show delay time -- we've got all sorts of delay metrics, each of which tells an interesting story.

US map uses size to represent the number of flights and the color to display delay time. Filtering by airline yields additional details.

There are some interesting insights that pop-out when you build a visualization this data.

The different airline strategies are quickly apparent in the treemap. Hub-and-spoke airlines (Delta, Continental) have one or two dominant boxes (origin location), surrounded by lots of small locations. A point-to-point airline like Southwest looks entirely different with lots of similarly sized boxes.
Flipping between delay types uncovers some unexpected results. For example, you might expect weather delays to be heavily correlated by airport. The data shows something a little different: Comair appears to be abnormally impacted by weather delays -- as if a dark cloud chases around their airplanes. While Comair might be overstating weather delay data to prevent paying for meal vouchers, a more reasonable Wikipedia investigation suggests that Comair flies smaller weather-susceptible Bombardier airplanes.

A few details about this demo for our technical audience:

For those of you following JuiceKit development, this is a demo of some of the newer features available in our open source Juicekit 1.2 distribution, and some of the features that will be coming to the 1.3 version. Treemap styling is now elegant, crisp, and allows for white borders, fixing a couple rendering bugs. There is a new tree-level depth feature that can make it easier to navigate treemaps with lots of layers. The airports map demonstrates a geographic layout built using GeoLayout JuiceKit and Flare components. A major improvement demonstrated by the airline-selector dropdown is the ability to keep nodes consistent between data reloads. This allows us to animate the nodes even though they are generated by our new LiveQuery component.

Designing Great Dashboards - Part 2

2009-09-15T14:54:50Z

About two weeks ago we released the first part of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use. We hope that you've already downloaded that document and have found it to be useful.

Today, we're making Part 2: Structure available for download. If you've already registered, you will be receiving this second installment automatically via email. However, if you've been denying that little voice in your head telling you to "just click it", now's your chance. Register today and get both parts!

Of course, all registrants will get part 3 when we make it available in a few weeks. Happy reading!

Designing Great Dashboards - The Book

2009-09-01T14:42:14Z

It's been a busy summer for us here at Juice with more and more companies asking us to help them take their data and create dashboard applications that help them get more done. While working on these accounts, we've seen an ever increasing interest and awareness in proper dashboarding techniques.

We believe that the best software is the software that people ~~like~~ love to use. Typically they “love it” because it helps them get their job done quicker and/or better. This can be for any of a number of reasons, but it’s great to see that buyers are becoming less satisfied with junky information applications.

So, we've decided to share the wealth. We've decided to compile many of the design tips we've harvested from our client projects over the years. These learnings are collected into a 3 part paper entitled A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use (catchy, isn't it?). We've written this to help people who want to create information applications that break out of the horrible constraints of the industry-standards we've all seen and have been disappointed with.

We've made this paper available to folks who we've done business with or who have registered with us in the past, but we didn't want our readers to be left out. If you didn't receive an invitation to download the paper (maybe because you're one of those lurkers out there -shame on you ;-) now's your chance to be part of the "in crowd". If you're interested, register to download your own copy of Part 1: Foundation. For those who register, we'll be mailing Parts 2 (Structure) and 3 (Information Design) over the next few weeks.

We think you'll find it really useful and hope you'll let us know how it helps you communicate your information more effectively.

Recreating Another New York Times Chart

2009-07-26T14:19:02Z

At the recent Turning Statistics into Knowledge conference (here's a synopsis), I saw The New York Times' Amanda Cox present on how their 25-person design team designs and builds infographics. In my opinion, The New York Times sets the bar for telling stories with data. Amanda, I later found out, is sometimes referred to as the Michael Phelps of Infographics -- presumably for her tendency to win infographics awards, not for getting photographed with a bong.

Here's a infographic from the presentation that I particularly liked:

This chart is a re-examination of the OECD Business Cycle Clock which:

has been designed to better visualize business cycles - fluctuations of economic activity around their long term potential level - and how some key economic indicators interact with the business cycle.

(Flowing Data also took a look at this chart and the other approaches to presenting the same data.)

Amanda's version of this chart is great because it demonstrates what can be done with the under-used scatterplot chart. Scatterplots are effective at presenting the relative performance of a set of things (e.g. product portfolio). Typically they show a snapshot in time; Amanda has added a time dimension without visually overwhelming the user.

As we've done in the past, we wanted to try to recreate a New York Times-style graphic in Excel. Here's how it came out:

We have a few tricks in here to make this Excel chart possible:

The chart is a scatterplot with smoothed connector lines. A second highlight series displays just values based on the time selection at the top.
The line chart at the bottom contains a bar chart that keys off of the time selector to help visually display the time range selected.
All the labels on the chart are extra data series with data labels rather than adding text labels onto the chart. This approach makes it easier to place the points in the appropriate spot and not worry about problems on resizing.
A simple macro on the "animate" button walks through the data.

You can download the Excel spreadsheet here

Think Like a Designer

2009-07-16T06:14:39Z

I'm a big fan of the work they're doing over at Duarte Design. Great, practical, motivating presentation design practices. Rarely do I come away from their site un-inspired about something.

Recently, Nancy Duarte participated in an interview with Jimmy Guterman of the MIT Sloan Management Review, which resulted in the article "How to Become a Better Manager By Thinking Like a Designer" (sign up is required). The quote that summarizes the article is:

“Often managers… rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning…leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.”

It's the same with information presentation. A focus on design at the beginning expands the ability to deliver context and meaning. But before you discount design as a concept for well, you know, "those artsy types", keep in mind, as Nancy puts it:

"Design is... crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way."

What this means is that the more you focus on design, the more you'll "speak" to your audience - which means you'll be more effective with your data presentation. It's about the audience, not you.

Here are some dashboard design principles that we use (with a few enhancements from Nancy's interview) to make sure we become better information presenters by thinking like designers:

Unity/Harmony - a sense that everything in the application belongs together, resulting in a "whole" that is greater than the sum of the parts. All the elements complement, augment, and enhance, as opposed to distract and detract from each other.

Takeaway: Identify the problem you're solving and make sure every element you place moves you closer to answering that question.
Proximity/Hierarchy - Things that are near each other are related. Hierarchy demonstrates relationships between items where appropriate. Proximity and Hierarchy both provide tremendous contextual cues leading to better understanding.

Takeaway: Place related things near each other and separate unrelated things. Remember, dogs and cats don't play well together.
Clear Space - White space in information display is very important and too often overlooked. Maximizing dashboard real estate means creating places for the eye to "rest" so that the non-white space is more effective.

Takeaway: Use white space in conjunction with proximity to help your viewers follow the story the information is telling.
Balance - Dominant focal points either give the viewer a sense of comfort (balanced) or spur them to action (unbalanced). Nancy points out "that does not mean all things must be in balance all the time. It is often effective to jar people and thereby effect a change in behavior or thought. Be aware, though, that once something has been thrown out of balance, it is the nature of the universe to find a new state of equilibrium."

Takeaway: Make sure the primary focal points in your information presentation tell the viewer either "it's ok, move on" or "you need to do something."
Contrast - Contrast creates interest to focus attention or highlight differences. Again quoting from the article "The value of contrast lies neither in the black nor the white, but in the tension between them."

Takeaway: Use Contrast to shift Balance so the viewer focusses and acts more quickly.
Proportion - More important elements deserve more real estate. It's tempting to want to present an unbiased view of the data. However, as Amanda Cox of the NYT graphics department stated at the OEDC "Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge" "data isn't like your kids, you don't have to pretend to love them equally."

Takeaway: Increase the size and emphasis of the values and decrease the size of labels and you'll find dramatically better impact and speed of understanding.
Simplicity - Stay focused on the specific fact on which you're trying to shine light. This sometimes means showing less data and a simpler display. I think Garr Reynolds sums it up best: "Don't confuse 'simplicity', which is hard to achieve, with 'simplistic', which is easy and usually lacking value."

Takeaway: Help your viewers focus on what's really important by pointing them to the kernels and not the chaff.

JuiceKit Sighted in Federal IT Dashboard

2009-07-02T13:36:52Z

We were excited to see that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and his team used our open-source JuiceKit treemap on the recently released Federal IT Spending Dashboard.

While Tim O'Reilly mistakenly gave credit for all the visualizations to Fusion Charts, we know better. A mother always recognizes her baby. I bet Google also recognized their Motion Chart.

The Best of Business Intelligence: Innovation at the Fringe

2009-06-28T21:49:04Z

Enough complaining about the broken bits of Business Intelligence; it's time to highlight the things that are good and right in the industry. Like most industries, the renewal and innovation occurs at the fringe, beyond the comfort zone of established vendors.

I've created five categories and a catch-all to capture the solutions and companies (not so much technologies) that are leading the next generation of Business Intelligence. The categories are:

Analyst tools
Dashboards
Targeted solutions
Open-source and free
Advanced visualizations
Other stuff

Naturally I've focused on areas of Juice expertise and focus -- not coincidentally, the places where we feel BI has neglected end-users. According to a study by the Business Application Research Center, BI end-user adoption sits at a lowly 8%.

I'm happy to take your suggestions (and update the post) for things I've missed in these categories or for entirely new categories.

Analyst tools

Tools that make it easy for analysts to pull data from multiple sources, analyze, visualize and share it.

Winner: Tableau, the reigning king of visual analytics tools, has added more web-based functionality to allow for online sharing and collaboration.

Runner-up: Good Data has arrived on the market with a web-first platform designed to democratize analytics. I had a chance to get a demo from the management team and was impressed with the ease of use and high-quality data presentation.

Dashboards

"A frequently updated analytical display that is clear and concise" (via a recent post)...and not likely to draw the rage of Stephen Few.

Winner: BonaVista Systems wants to make Excel a "first choice dashboard tool." From the humble position of sparkline plug-in vendor, BonaVista has taken a leadership role in encouraging more effective dashboard design.

Runner-up (tie): Two BI companies, Qlikview and Microstrategy, seem to be following BonaVista's lead. Unfortunately, they may only be dipping in a toe as I found just a couple examples that break from the traditional over-glossy, gauge-riddled dashboard interface.

Targeted solutions

Companies that serve a narrow slice of the BI world extremely well. The desire to be all things to all people has been an Achilles Heel of the BI industry. The general purpose BI platforms often prove too broad and too generic to serve the unique problems of specific industries or functional areas.

Winner: Wall Street on Demand is a brilliant, below-the-radar provider of information solutions to the financial sector. Their sparse, articulate marketing text and few screenshots hint at a company that knows exactly what they do and deliver high-quality BI solutions. I wish I knew more.

Runner-up (multiple): The following are just a few companies that have focused on an industry or functional segment to deliver targeted BI solutions:

Quantivo for customer behavior analytics
Visual I|O for pharmaceuticals
LucidEra for sale pipeline reporting and analytics

Open-source and free

(I know there is a difference.)

Winner: Pentaho offers an open-source end-to-end BI suite that is a competitive alternative to the big-guys. Of course, the implementation it isn't necessarily cheap or easy.

Runner-up: If anything should scare the BI industry, it is the possibility of a Google Analytics model extended into more general data analysis and visualization tools. Google Fusion Tables may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Advanced visualizations

Bringing leading-edge visualization techniques out of academia and into the business world.

Winner: Many Eyes continues to impress with high-quality visualizations. They are easy to create and clean in design and usability. Impress your boss with a slick visualization in your next presentation.

Runner-up (tie): Openviz / Advanced Visual Systems and Panopticon appear to be the two BI vendors battling it out for leadership in advanced visualization solutions. Unlike Many Eyes, these guys lack Tufte-esque sophistication in infoviz design. That said, there is a big difference between creating a one-off New York Times-quality visualization and delivering a toolset that is re-usable in many different situations.

Other stuff to be admired

Free charts with good default design. InetSoft's Style Chart and Google Charts offer free, embeddable charts.

Jargon-free BI marketing. With few exceptions, BI web sites are densely populated with those awful stock-photography people sitting around conference tables (or worse, the ethnically-diverse V-formation marching at you) and meaningless business jargon and techno-babble. I really appreciate Blink Logic's web site with its straight talk and clean, readable design.

Beyond the desktop. RoamBI has a great-looking iPhone application that is designed to "transform your data into insightful, interactive visualizations delivered to the iPhone." It makes the Oracle and Qlikview iPhone apps look old-school.

Five Features of Effective Filters

2009-06-05T12:08:30Z

I've developed a bit of a penchant (obsession?) for decomposing the pieces of analytical applications and framing the good and the bad characteristics. So far I've taken on treemaps, real-time dashboards, alerts, composite measures, success metrics.

Next up the poor, neglected, and taken-for-granted filter. For such a common and essential component, it seems rare that designers take a moment to consider how to make the best possible filtering mechanism. Here are the five elements I consider critical to a good filter selector along with examples from exemplary interface designs.

Selections
Impact
Context
Persistence
Short-cuts

Selections

Good filters make it obvious to users what has been selected. That might seem like an obvious necessity but consider what happens when you filter in an Excel list. The filter section, even if it is a single item, is immediately hidden from view.

Jonathan Harris' frequently referenced We Feel Fine visualization offers one of my favorite filtering examples. Notice how the selected items are highlighted and the non-selected items are de-emphasized. The bar at the top clearly shows what has been selected, even after the filter selector is "put away."

Impact

The best filtering mechanisms also give instant feedback about the impact of your filters. This can be as simple as a subtle indicator that the filters are being applied. Even better, as demonstrated in the The New York Times' Rent or Buy site, the graph animates in real-time as filters are applied. This creates a very tangible connection that helps the user understand the impact of the filtering choices.

Context

Filters should provide information around the items being selected. What does it look like? How many are there? Take the simple font selector in Office applications: Isn't it a no brainer that the names of the options are shown in the actual typeface? Here are a couple other fine examples of context:

Click shirt is Bret Victor's brilliant t-shirt design interface. In it, he offers an elegant filter implementation where all the selections show images of what you are about to select.

Elastic lists is one of the most innovative approaches to filtering. The height of individual blocks in the selectable stack shows the frequency of the items, an embedded sparkline shows the trend, and brightness indicates "weight of the metadata value compared to the overall distribution" (a bit too ambitious/confusing, in my view).

Persistence

Given the importance of filters to most information applications, it is surprising how often the interface makes them hard to find. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the failure of many analytical and reporting applications is that "they assume users know precisely what they need before they’ve begun the analysis." Filtering shouldn't be a one shot deal; the functionality should always be accessible.

Kayak, a travel site, integrated the selection filters into the results so users can easily change their trip criteria without having to start a new search.

Short-cuts

Finally, filters should make it easy to apply common selections (All, None) or complex sets (My Saved Filters, Northwest Region).

Moodstream by Getty Images recognizes that users aren't always going to want to configure a bunch of filters individually. The presets wheel solves this problem by offering a series of pre-defined "filter sets."

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the sophisticated and powerful filtering functionality delivered in Tableau. In addition to providing filtering by selecting graphs (i.e. in context filtering), the application allows for multiple selector types, wild-carding, conditional filters, top/bottom filters, and on and on. If you want a comprehensive catalog of potential ways to offer filtering, watch the Filter Data video here.