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The Power of Visualizations
I have a strange facination with beautiful data visualizations. I was always one of those people who was never satisfied with just functionality, I didn't want to use any app that wasn't beautiful or look at any graph that was ugly and obfuscated its readers with too much information. Long before this class I stumbled upon infographic sites like informationisbeautiful.net and visual.ly and was a huge fan of great visualizaitons ever since.
What is so useful about these is that they are functional and make you interested and want to read it. I can much more easily look at two or three nicely done infogrpahics than read even one or two long articles (kind of like the ones we had to read this week!). And this speaks along the same lines as the article. I believe that there is just so much information that we collect now, that is is very important to not only choose carefully what information we want to be presented, but also how we want it to be presented so that it will be easily digested and remembered.
While reading the article, i didn't realize just how many ways there were to categorize and portray information. What I also noticed is how time consuming some of these look to be. I think that the benefits are clear, but the costs are also great. I wonder, maybe some times it's just not worth it because so much effort goes into making a good visualization? This seems like something that you have to be trained in making. I would not know which style to use to represent my data and I would also not really know the best and most efficient way to go about making them.
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Creating Better Viz
I mentioned this issue briefly in another post, but you've actually pointed out a big open question in information visualization. More specifically, how do you help people who are somewhat skilled and informed to create really effective visualizations? For example, Microsoft Excel works reasonably well here, in helping a general audience to create reasonably good graphs.
Encourages Learning
Informationisbeautiful.net is one of my go to sites as well. I totally agree that well executed and beautiful info graphs promote learning. What I love is that it gets me excited about topics/information that I didn’t even know I was interested in. Learning new things, even outside my typical field of interest, is always exciting, especially when you understand its content. There is nothing more satisfying than learning something new, like a new fact, or a new demographic. I think visualization is a great way also to encourage new interests in people, including kids.
Aya Demler
That is something I struggle
That is something I struggle with sometimes too. The cost and benefits of making a diagram visually appealing as opposed to spending that time elsewhere, perhaps proofreading my article or starting my next assignment. However I guess for me, in academia, there is a certain expectation of how well your work should be based off of how much time you are given. I imagine in a work setting, that applies as well. However if my primary goal is to get a specific message out and this diagram was going to make things explicitly clear, I would invest a lot more time and effort to both learn and do it. On another note, I am currently taking another class where we have been making different visualizations with the same data for the past month. While I do seem to gain different insights each time, each visualization takes a significant amount of time to make and I am starting to wonder how applicable or realistic it is when working in a company.
Managers have short attention spans
@Tiffany From my experience working at several companies and taking a class called Organizational Communication, I've learned that managers have incredibly short attention spans! Most of their day consists of talking. We read this article: http://rafael.glendale.edu/ppal/Busad%20101/mintzbergmar1990.pdf where the author, Henry Mintzberg, shadowed managers and analyzed what it was that they actually did. Mintzberg reveals that managers have this constant mind set where they have limited time to complete a task and instead of communicating to their coworkers what needs to be done, they take on the task themselves. They don't like wasting time reading through documents and emails. They prefer to communicate verbally because the time consumed is much less then reading.
Therefore, I think a data visualization is essential when trying to communnicate anything to someone in charge. Chances are they're not going to sit down and read a 200 page report. Having some concise visualization that sums up the findings is completely necessary and time-effective.