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Juice Analytics

Analyticstime!August 20 2008

If you struggle to legitimize analytics within your organization, you can't touch this video for a powerful explanation of the impact of analytics:

MC Hammer at the AlwaysOn/STVP Summit at Stanford, "Music Artists Go Entrepreneurial." Around minute 24:00.

Review: 5 Options for Embedding Charts in a Web PageJuly 22 2008

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from the folks at Widgenie asking for a blog review of their newly launched service. Widgenie targets non-technical people looking for an easy way to create and publish charts or data visualizations on the web. As I began looking it over, I wondered whether this problem had been solved elsewhere. It has. I’ve summarized my experiences with five services that can help you go from data table to web chart with ease.

I evaluated the services across three criteria:

Data upload: simple process, options for file types, control after loading data, ease of updating data.
Chart options: different chart types, control of labels, axes, ordering data, and formatting.
Chart design: effective data presentation, absence of chart junk.

A few things I didn’t worry about, but might be worth considering:

Managing charts that you have created
Animation or interactivity of charts (usually this is more distracting than useful)
Easy registration process
Performance across all the chart types

I gave each service a score of 1 (poor) to 3 (great) for each criteria. Top performers are highlighted in green.

Embedded Charts Solutions

Unlike some of the other solutions, Google S

Godin Dumps on Bar Charts; Data Visualization Record Falls to 1 and 1July 13 2008

Seth Godin, well-known marketing guru, took a strong and misguided stand against bar charts1 in a recent blog post entitled “The three laws of great graphs”

Godin suggests that bar charts (and presumably other chart types like scatterplots, bubble charts, bullet charts, treemaps, etc.) give too much latitude for data confusion and ambiguity when used in presentations. In Godin’s view, a chart should make a single, clear point and leave no room for alternative conclusions.

“The only reason (did I mention only) to use a chart in a presentation is to make a point. If you want to prove some deep insight or give people textured data to draw their own conclusions, DON’T put it in a presentation.” “If the facts demand nuance, don’t use a graph, because you won’t get nuance, you’ll get confusion.”

Godin had hit on a similar point a while back when he critiqued Edward Tufte’s favorite infographic Napoleon’s March to Moscow.

“I think [Tufte] is completely out of his gourd and totally wrong. I think this is one of the worst graphs ever made…To make me take 15 minutes to study it doesn’t make sense.”

I agree that complex infographics aren’t an effective co

Why Analytical Applications FailJuly 7 2008

Many analytical applications fail for a simple reason: they assume users know precisely what they need before they’ve begun the analysis. There are cases where this assumption holds and the user has a specific end-point in mind. But more often, users depend on the tool to track down an answer with only a vague idea of where to start. The exploratory analysis that follows can feel like swimming upstream when the application isn’t designed to facilitate the journey.

The source of this mismatch is partly rooted in the technical perspective of database developers. The simplest path to providing data access is to let users fill out a form to define a SQL query. It is a linear mindset that isn’t well-suited to ambiguous problems.

I’d like to offer a couple examples that illustrates the difference between the common, form-based approach and a more dynamic, interactive approach. Then I’ll explain the implicit assumptions behind the different models and why it matters.

At its heart, Travelocity is a travel analysis tool intended to help you find the best flight (or hotel, car rental, package, etc.) given a complex set of parameters. The relative importance of each of these parameters (departure day/time, return day/time, airports, connections, preferred airlines, price, etc.) is a personal preference… but not one that is explicitly or fully known even to the user. For example, it would be hard for m

10 Minute Reviews: Open Flash ChartMay 29 2008

We frequently get requests to review and write about analytics-related solutions. I’ve put off most of these requests because it sounded like a lot of work. Then I had an 4-hour-work-week-style epiphany: most new users only give a new product or service a few minutes before they make up their mind. Why can’t I make the same snap judgement and call it an expert opinion?

First up is Open Flash Charts, pointed out to us by Matt Bear. This is an open source project started by John Glazebrook to provide flash charts that can be embedded in web pages. I love John’s explanation for taking on this project:

“Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.”