The Science of Visual Analytics
September 1, 2010
Today LUCRUM hosted our second BI Symposium. Once again, it was well attended and we had some great speakers! I’m hoping that this becomes a regular event. If you have yet to attend, I encourage you to come to our next event (to be scheduled).
Our first speaker was Mr. Stuart Woodward, President OD OcuCue. (http://ocucue.com/) OcuCue is an interesting start-up that’s all focused on data visualization. I always love listening to visual experts. There is such a science to visual design. It’s about understanding the psychology of how users think and perceive what they see. If you are creating a dashboard, you have to design it in the way people think – we read from left to right, heavy color should be at the lower left hand side, etc.
“Good design has two key elements. Graphical elegance is often found in the simplicity of design and complexity of data.” – Edward Tufte
Mr. Woodward’s company creates meaningful dashboards that are icon based. They go beyond speedometers and graphs and actually create a customized dashboards with icons that are meaningful to the company using them. One example that he showed was for a hospital. There are some rooms that can only take female patients or only male patients. To show bed availability, their dashboard has a pink pillow or a blue pillow to represent which rooms are available. Hmmm…never thought of that!
How are you presenting data to your users? Are you simplifying the message? Setting up the information from left to right? Are your colors meaningful? (ie Red should mean bad, green is good)
OK…gotta run and listen to the next speaker!
- Jodie
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