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Comment by don_draper | Hacker News Reader

Could someone point out examples of visualizations that make a big difference. I've spent quite a bit of time creating maps and graphs for corporate bigwigs and it always just seems like eye candy. It seems like a list with percentages, instead of fancy graphs, is often just as good and way cheaper.

Aside: I understand trends like stock value over time can be useful to see in a chart, but often times other charts seem unnecessary to me.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

Four Data Sets:

Simple Statistical Summary of Each Data Set is Identical.

Visually Totally Different.

edit: fixed url - thanks @eddmc

Your link should be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

Interesting stuff!

Good visualizations show trends that would take longer to discover by reading the numbers. They're a lot more user friendly, too.

I think they're a great communication tool between the technical people and everyone else, and it creates a simpler dialog. "Why is there such a big drop in the graph here" "Well, our traffic was lower because..."

I think it's also an emotional/psychological thing. Business people like to see upwards trends! It makes them more confident in the business.

etc. I'm sure there are far more qualified people to answer this.

Graphics help make stories memorable. There is a well-documented physiological phenomena called the “picture superiority effect.” Stories told with pictures and words are more memorable than when told verbally or with words alone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_superiority_effect

Edward Tufte was already mentioned and his books contains some really good examples

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informat...

I'd say, yes numerical is often just as good, but not always. Also, in my opinion, whether information is displayed numerically or visually, the key is to be as minimalistic as possible.

Lots of text is hostile. Much business runs on PowerPoint. A visualization competes for attention. In rare cases it encodes analytic information graphically. Like distances on a map, or the rate of job growth in a line slope, etc.

Imagine An Inconvenient Truth[1] with all the charts and visuals replaced with tables of percentages....

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/

Edit: where's that Markdown standard spec...

Like you say, it's normally just for eye candy

>and it always just seems like eye candy. It seems like a list with percentages, instead of fancy graphs, is often just as good and way cheaper.

It seems like a lot of engineering type folks just won't accept that most people would rather look at a colorful picture than a list of percentages. If you gave me a choice between looking at a fancy graph that took up more space and showed less data and a list of numbers, I'll take the graph every time. Because I'm a human, and humans get bored easily, and humans appreciate art and color.

Don't downplay the importance of eye candy. People like eye candy, just like they like mouth candy. Sure, eating raw sugar is rationally stupid especially when there are many more logical, healthy choices out there. But sometimes you just want to taste something really really sweet; sometimes you really would just rather look at something really pretty.

A picture should not be worth a thousand words. Any chart included in a report should be an illustration of a single sentence like "sales are way up this quarter" or "visit frequency is highly correlated to user age".

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