Stephen Few (Perceptual Edge)

Stephen Few has pretty good books on the topic: http://www.perceptualedge.com/ He is very good at explaining Tufte's work. The best part of his books and website are comparisons between a typical charts or dashboards and his re-designs. Following is more relevant, his article on pie charts (PDF): http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf

I love histogram sliders! I think they were originally developed by Chris Ahlberg in Ben Shneiderman's group, and were later commercialized in Spotfire (I have yet to see them in any other infoviz system except Panopticon - https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=965). Jeff Heer did some work a few decades to generalize into 'scented widget' (http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/scented-widgets). With systems like DuckDB it's now even easier to implement them into various visual analytic systems.

In HCI, I think the general (and researched) consensus about pie charts is that they are fine and probably perform better than alternatives when they have a few (as in probably 4 or less) slices, but then go to total crap for anything much more. I think one of the best essays on this is from Stephen Few, but there's a fair amount of research on the Wikipedia page too. https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf

Great article! Another nice resource for picking colors in data visualizations is from Stephen Few: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/ru…

Yep. I love design and creative ideas, but they still have to be efficient. This just makes me waste my time compared to a table where I can sort/filter by different criteria. Most of the time, "creative" visualizations tend to actually obscure meaning, or worse, mislead viewers. Recommended reading: Show me the numbers by Stephen Few (his blog is also great: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/)

I've done quite a bit of reading about digital dashboards, and agree. The first example in "Information Dashboard Design" is filled with gauges - and an explanation of why it's a bad design. Edward Tufte's books are absolutely amazing, and filled with beautiful visualizations: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi. Stephen Few has several books on dashboards/charting that are really practical. See http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php for a taste.

Stephen Few's website isn't much better: http://www.perceptualedge.com/

Stephen Few has an excellent overview of why pie charts should be avoided: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/sa… Neither pies nor mosaic charts should be used if you need exact readings of the data --- though mosaic plots do have the advantage of being rectangular, making segments much easier to label with values than the segments of pie charts.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ http://www.perceptualedge.com/ I've read books by both these authors and they were very good. Their websites cover most of the important content found in the books.

Good stuff, thanks for the links. Especially Felton's course page has several good references that were new to me. Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type [1] seems a fun read. Great designs also on the competition page [2]. [1] http://thinkingwithtype.com/ [2] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1374

And I just raised $27,000 to fund writing my first book [1]. I'm a first time author and despite my best efforts agents and publishers wouldn't touch the project. The world is changing rapidly, and traditional publishing just doesn't make sense for many authors anymore. Also of course refer to the recent discussion on O'Reilly's changing practices [2]. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/605480326/beyond-connecting-the-do… [2] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521

I suggests everyone read these whitepapers on dashboard design. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard_Design.pd… http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pitfalls.pdf The author also has written a great book on dashboard design. Operations dashboards are essential for any (tech?) company. Business dashboards are another beast all together.

Have a look at http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/ There is some great critique of various BI visualisations. I highly recommend the book Information Dashboard Design by the author Stephen Few

I really like Stephen Few. https://www.perceptualedge.com/

Gauges are actually pretty terrible interfaces for quickly communicating information in a dashboard. * hard to scan (insufficient contrast between needle and gauge) * typically don't show labels/values for boundaries * typically don't show labels/values for scale/units * typically don't show labels/values for alert thresholds * even when labels are present, they are still difficult to read quickly due to lack of alignment * when displaying multiple gauges of related metrics, you can't visually compare them without looking closely Here's a pretty good overview on dashboard design (PDF, sorry) from Stephen Few that includes a good breakdown of why gauges are terrible: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard_Design.pd… I can highly recommend Stephen Few's books on dashboard design and data visualization--he's much more focused on real-world applications than Tufte.

Look at Stephen Few's website and books. http://perceptualedge.com/examples.php There is also ggplot, ggplot2 and the Grammar of Graphics by Leland Wilkinson. Sadly, Algebra is so incompatible with Geometry that I found the book beautiful but useless for my problem domains after buying and reading and pondering it.

https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/s… - Stephen Few, August 2007

I was thinking of Few when writing my response but I couldn't recall his name. You're right, he's pretty good - http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php#Articles

You might find Cycle Plots [1, 2] useful. [1]: https://www.cvast.tuwien.ac.at/topics/cycle-plot-climate-data [2]: https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/guests/intro_to_cycle_plots.pd…

blog post with a better explanation of what's going on from Stephen Few - the designer of the bullet chart: https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.…

That's not the fault of the chart type. It's just a bad execution in that blog post. I.e. the shorter bars should be very light, and feel more like a backgrund for the actual bar. If you look at a good example it actually is intuitive: https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.…

I would strongly suggest perusing through the resources of Stephen Few over at Perceptual Edge. Library: http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php You could do a lot worse than becoming familiar with Few's "Information Dashboard Design" book, and the Perceptual Edge blog contains a wealth of material, some of which ended up in his subsequent books. Older posts on his blog also include reviews of different author's books, often having to do with cognition or analysis related topics which are also informative. Seems he has retired from his consultant business and now blogs at: http://www.stephen-few.com Here's one of his whitepapers you may find helpful: https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Formatting_and_Lay…

Please, please, please stop using pie charts to try to visualize ratios! See here[0] from 2007 for better alternatives. I'm sure there are newer visualizations as well. [0]: https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/s…

Also served over https thanks to the RapidSSL cert https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=2467

It's encouraging to read this having read Stephen Few's blog post "O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul"[1] earlier this year about his troubles publishing Information Dashboard Design through O’Reilly Media and choosing to publish the second edition without them and how difficult they made it. [1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521

Stephen Few actually self publishes for reasons he explains here: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521 I'm not sure why he hasn't made an ebook though. This is a new release so it may be coming.

> Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable. The tradeoff used to be that if you'd go to a publisher they'd do your marketing. Every creative type I know of is not only utterly n00bish when it comes to marketing but also regards it as a disease you wouldn't touch with a long pole. But these days even famous publishers expect authors to do their own marketing [1]. Every last bit of it. So yes, go self publish! Take a course on marketing while at it. Does wonders. [1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521

They arn't. Stephen Few wrote a really good book a few (ha!) years back called 'Information Dashboard Design' (0596100167) which addressed the issue of circular dials and gauges. Here is a good essay on the subject by Stephen Few (http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf). Basically, it boils down to the same arguments put forward by Tufte et al. It is far easier to compare horizontal or vertical positions than radial values.

The same reason that pie charts are not very effective - it's relatively hard to make comparisons between angles instead of lengths like in a bar chart. It's probably even harder with a doughnut. Here is a PDF article by Stephen Few about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf

I do a lot of charting for financial services software. The best practical book that I've found is The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures. Simple but practical guidelines for displaying pie/line/area graphs. But for your situation, check out some of these sites which focus on more complicated graphing techniques: http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/04/50-great-examples-of-infogra… http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/news.php http://patternbrowser.org/ http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/15-stunning-examples-of-data-vi… http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/