Complex Diagrams

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I will be presenting two sessions at VizThink 2009, Feb. 22-25, in San Jose. The sessions are a 90-minute workshop on User-Centered Information Design and a 20 minute “snapshot” talk on Visualizing Complexity.

If you see me there, please introduce yourself!

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This is the slideshow and audio from my Infocamp 2008 presentation on User-Centered Information Design.

The audio synchronization seems to work when played straight through, but not when you manually advance the slides.

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The Takeaway has a clever interactive graph, showing the summary from a different poll or tracking web site on each row, and the states as columns. Column width reflects the number of electoral votes for that state. It’s a good way to get an aggregate view of what’s going on, as each source is a little different.

They’ve done a great job with this; it’s a great presentation of a ton of information abstracted in a constructive manner. The key issues (weight and inclination of each state) are present, with very little else to get in the way.

There are a few changes I’d make. The mouseover key is a little awkward, as it obstructs a lot of the image. I probably would have gotten rid of it altogether, and put the state info in the footer, as they’ve done with the poll name and score. I probably also would have put the score for each row in the row, either at the left, near the icon, or in a rightmost column, rather than forcing you to mouseover each column.

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A few more bits of visual goodness related to dollars and sense for this election season.

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Freakonomics has a nice follow-up to the Washington Post graphic below, showing two slightly different versions that are optimized to see the breakdowns in numbers of people and percent of tax income related to each segment. Great stuff. Go check it out.

(Via Tim O’Reilly’s twitter)

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Digital Roam has a whole series of hand-drawn micro-graphs showing economic activity and indicators for the Bush and Clinton administrations. Clear, simple, and very compelling.

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The Washington Post has published this excellent graphic comparing the proposed tax policies of the two mainstream candidates. It does a great job of clearly contrasting the impact per tax-bracket in terms of percent and average change in tax burden.

Click through for their brief commentary. (And note that it’s brief because the graph does a good job of saying it all.)

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Electoral-Vote.com is an excellent and popular site for tracking polls for president on a state by state basis. One of the nice features is a historical graph that shows the changing number of electoral votes for each candidate over the election season.

Currently it looks something like this:

(click to see the original on electoral-vote.com)

Just for fun, I decided to see what it would look like showing the candidate totals as a single shared line. keep reading…

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Should you be required to work in Visio, you may well find yourself, as I did, wishing to measure your drawing in pixels. I couldn’t figure out how do do it, though Visio does support such diverse measurements as Ciceros and Didots.

I finally found the definitive answer from Microsoft: For some types of drawings, you may want to change the measurement units to pixels. However, a pixel isn’t a unit of measurement. A pixel is just a dot on a screen and the size of the dot varies for different screens. To simulate pixels, set the measurement units to points.

Needless to say, this is not satisfying. It’s true a pixel is only an on-screen measure, and is clearly only useful for a few, obscure situations, such as when creating interface mockups, wireframes, or prototypes for software, the web, or any other sort of images meant to be viewed on a screen.

Luckily, Visio provides a set of features that allow a fairly simple, two step work-around. Warning: doing this on existing Visio documents may severely distort your existing drawings. I suggest working on duplicate files, not originals. keep reading…

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The Harvard Business Review has published an article by researchers from IBM’s Many Eyes project, discussing the benefits of good information visualization.

A choice quote:
Our research has found that the compelling presentation of data through visualization’s advanced techniques generates a surprising volume of impassioned conversations… That level of engagement could foster the kind of grassroots innovation CEOs dream of.

Hopefully this will help increase corporate interest in information visualization.

(via Information Design Watch)

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This is the talk I gave at Ignite Seattle 5, February 19, 2008. The Ignite format requires presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes, with the slides advancing every 15 seconds whether the presenter is ready or not. The original name for this format was “Ask Later.”

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Zillow has posted a series of excellent diagrams which show relative changes in assorted housing markets, broken down by segment. Their diagrams are very clear and allow fairly quick access to a lot of good information. Please go explore there, and then come back here for my commentary. keep reading…