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Stephen Few's books are the right answer for designing practical, actionable visualizations that a user will learn and use literally all the time. Edward Tufte
by vitovito 12y ago
Stephen Few's books are the right answer for designing practical, actionable visualizations that a user will learn and use literally all the time. Edward Tufte is the right answer for designing deep, data-filled visualizations in print, and learning the principles to design new things in digital.
Given that you've "come across" the two best resources in the field, I wonder if your lack of an "Aha!" moment is because you're not answering real questions with it.
Stephen Few lists several requirements for a dashboard to be a dashboard, and two of them are timely information and the need to look at it constantly.
Even were this not a side project, I can't imagine "car hire price data" changes minute to minute, nor that you would need to be looking at this data many times an hour and make split-second decisions based on it.
That means you're not designing a dashboard: you're designing a report. And since you don't have a real use case, you're imagining things that might be useful for an unknown user with unknown needs, and that's not how reports or dashboards work. You design a chart to answer a question, not come up with questions to ask based on a chart (we're not talking about ad-hoc visualization for exploration, here).
There isn't going to be one good way to represent all the data at once. Instead, take this to be a report, and produce a chart, graph, trend, etc. for each interesting combination. Start simple, with individual numbers, and work up to complicated contrasts. It's a side project; the only user is yourself. Let that be enough and just learn about data visualization generally.
- sixQuarks 12y agoEdward Tufte's web site, http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ is absolutely awful. So much information overload. How is this guy a visualization design expert?
- danesparza 12y agoStephen Few's website isn't much better: http://www.perceptualedge.com/ http://www.perceptualedge.com/
- valevk 12y agoMany who are experts in an area are eunuchs, "they know how to do it".
- tomek_zemla 12y agoYes, it always baffled me, too! Especially because I have been studying from his books and they are exceptional both in terms of visual design and content!
- tuyguntn 12y agoThey are mostly design experts not a front-end stuff
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pbowyer 12y ago> Given that you've "come across" the two best resources in the field, I wonder if your lack of an "Aha!" moment is because you're not answering real questions with it. Nailed it I think. It's one thing to do the technical exercise, another to try and get meaningful results when you don't know what you're looking for. I haven't read Stephen Few's books, only newsletters and online articles. It sounds like his books are worth getting. I own the set of Edward Tufte's - I pored over them as a student and each is a work of art in itself. > since you don't have a real use case, you're imagining things that might be useful for an unknown user with unknown needs, and that's not how reports or dashboards work. You design a chart to answer a question, not come up with questions to ask based on a chart (we're not talking about ad-hoc visualization for exploration, here). I have got that one backwards before :) Thank you for your fantastic reply!