Stephanie D.H. Evergreen's Blog, page 13

Decade of Data Viz

Well, that just flew by. Ten years ago, I was in the throes of writing my dissertation on Presenting Data Effectively, knowing I had focused on a topic that the world was hungry for, even if they didn’t know it yet. I had collected enough literature and data to know that a better way was […]

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Four Ways to Show Projections

Of course we all want to know what will happen in the future. These days folks are looking at data like it has a crystal ball. To the extent that we provide our audiences with projected data, let’s talk about ways to visualize the projected data. Because here’s the thing: The data that isn’t real […]

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Better Graphs Tell Clearer Stories: The Breast Cancer Example

Half of getting people to become more aware of issues like breast cancer and change their behavior is to make an emotional pitch that gets in their guts or their hearts. Recent ad campaigns, like Know Your Girls from the Ad Council, have been really successful here. But the other half of raising awareness and […]

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When Will Bad Infographics End?

Back in November of **2010** I set up a Google Alert for “infographic.” Oh, I thought, these are an interesting development in how we communicate data. But either the quality of the design will drastically improve or these things will be a fad that disappears within a couple years. Nine years later and it is […]

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Excel vs. Tableau vs. R

We are hard core believers that you should become the master of the tools you own. If your company relies on Microsoft, figure out how to use Excel to make amazing data visualizations. If your company invested in a site-wide license for Tableau, climb over that learning curve and master it. If you are working […]

Audience Engagement Strategies

Dr. Sheila Robinson is a master at engaging an audience. She’s honed this skill through decades of work in education where you have to know how to take the pulse of a room and determine whether a change in direction is needed to keep the group tuned in. You might think I’m talking about middle […]

The Dashboard Sketch Process

“I vote no.” This short answer speeds up the dashboard development process significantly. And I developed the question my client voted on in roughly 3 minutes, by showing her a quick sketch of some possible graph options. My client is in charge of a dashboard that tracks how high school students in Mississippi apply for […]

Everyone’s Opinions About Your Dashboard

The primary struggle with dashboard development is not identifying the right key performance indicators, building the graphs in your favorite software, or even getting people excited about the idea of using a dashboard. That’s all a cake walk compared to managing people and their reactions to the dashboard. Let me tell you a couple stories […]

Data Fortune Tellers

Pick a color, any color. You know how this game goes. You pick a color, your friend opens and closes the fortune teller, spelling out the name of the color you selected. You pick a number from the visible choices, your friend opens and closes the fortune teller, until you eventually pick a flap that […]

You Gotta Have An Equidistant Axis

Here’s the thing: The scale used on each axis must have equal intervals. It’s an easy mistake to make. Excel automatically spaces your intervals and labels equidistant from one another but it is assuming that your intervals actually are equidistant. In this graph, that’s not the case. We are missing the months of March, April, […]