Simple Designs are Hard

Reading Peter's last couple of posts got me thinking about a great TED conference presentation made by former Broadway pianist and NY Times tech columnist David Pogue. A couple of years ago he talked at TED about the design of technology and the importance of simplicity in design.

A lot of what we do as BI developers is design ways for people to mess around with, and learn from, information. One one of the key principles behind a doing this well is to ensure simplicity. A lot of what Tufte and other data visualisation experts talk about can be seen to derive from this principle, and as Peter said, despite the experimental and anecdotal evidence to support it, it's something the vendors often don't do well. One of the reasons for this is that it's just plain hard, and probably something that most software engineers are not very good at doing. Simple, elegant and intuitive interfaces for BI apps are not just aesthetically pleasing, they lead to better understanding on the part of decision makers, and creative uses of the tools that can lead to unexpected insights - which sounds awfully like the vendors' own jargon. I wish they'd listen to people like David Pogue a bit more.

Threat Level "Burgundy, If You Will"

Just when you thought you'd seen every stupid data visualisation trick out there, someone invents the "magic pie chart" and the rotating "statistical lazy susan." The US cable news networks are outdoing themselves during the US presidential primaries, and breaking just about every rule in the data visualisation book. BI vendors, eat your hearts out! Check out this gem from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:

Criticising Edward Tufte

I'm a huge fan of Edward Tufte, and so are many people who are interested in the graphical presentation of information. He's got a lot of good things to say that BI people should listen to, and he says it in an engaging way. Pictured, right, is Minard's diagram of Napoleon's march on Moscow, used by Tufte as an exemplar of good graphical information presentation.

As with any guru, though, his adherents sometimes get bogged down with the minutae of what he says, rather than the underlying principles he tries to communicate. There's an interesting couple of posts over at Emergent Chaos in response to a criticism of the Minard diagram as a communication tool, and Juice Analytic's follow-up. The original criticism was made by Seth Godin in the following video: