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MARCH 27, 2013

ARTICLE
DATA
When Data
Visualization Works —
And When It Doesn’t
by Jim Stikeleather

This document is authorized for use only in Dr. Saurabh Mittal's PGP14_ADV at Indian Institute of Management - Rohtak from Aug 2024 to Jan 2025.
 DATA

When Data Visualization

Works — And When It
Doesn’t
by Jim Stikeleather
MARCH 27, 2013

I am uncomfortable with the growing emphasis on big data and its stylist, visualization. Don’t get me
wrong — I love infographic representations of large data sets. The value of representing information
concisely and effectively dates back to Florence Nightingale, when she developed a new type of pie
chart to clearly show that more soldiers were dying from preventable illnesses than from their
wounds. On the other hand, I see beautiful exercises in special effects that show off statistical and
technical skills, but do not clearly serve an informing purpose. That’s what makes me squirm.

Ultimately, data visualization is about communicating an idea that will drive action. Understanding
the criteria for information to provide valuable insights and the reasoning behind constructing data
visualizations will help you do that with efficiency and impact.

For information to provide valuable insights, it must be interpretable, relevant, and novel. With so
much unstructured data today, it is critical that the data being analyzed generate interpretable
information. Collecting lots of data without the associated metadata — such as what is it, where was
it collected, when, how and by whom — reduces the opportunity to play with, interpret, and gain
insights from the data. It must also be relevant to the persons who are looking to gain insights, and to
the purpose for which the information is being examined. Finally, it must be original, or shed new
light on an area. If the information fails any one of these criteria, then no visualization can make it
valuable. That means that only a tiny slice of the data we can bring to life visually will actually be
worth the effort.

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 Once we’ve narrowed the universe of data down to those that satisfy these three requirements, we
must also understand the legitimate reasons to construct data visualizations, and recognize what
factors affect the quality of data visualizations. There are three broad reasons for visualizing data:

• Confirmation: If we already have a set of assumptions about how the system we are interested in —
for example, a market, customers, or competitors — operates, visualizations can help us check
those assumptions. They can also enable us to observe whether the underlying system has
deviated from the model we had and assess the risk of the actions we are about to undertake based
upon those assumptions. You see this approach in some enterprise dashboards.
• Education: There are two forms of education that visualization offers. One is simply reporting: here
is how we measure the underlying system of interest, and here are the values of those measures in
some comparative form — for instance, over time, or against other systems or models. The other is
to develop intuition and new insights on the behavior of a known system as it evolves and changes
over time, so that humans can get an experiential feel of the system in an extremely compressed
time frame. You often see this model in the “gameification” in training and development.
• Exploration: When we have large sets of data about a system we are interested in and the goal is to
provide optimal human-machine interactions (HMI) to that data to tease out relationships,
processes, models, etc., we can use visualization to help build a model to allow us to predict and
better manage the system. The practice of using visual discovery in lieu of statistics is called
exploratory data analysis (EDA) and too few businesses make use of it.

Assuming the visualization creator has gotten it all right — a well-defined purpose; the necessary and
sufficient amount of data and meta data to make the visualization interpretable; enabling relevant
and original insights for the business — what gives us confidence that these insights are now worthy
of action? Our ability to understand and to a degree control three areas of risk can define the
visualizations’ resulting value to the business:

• Data quality:The quality of the underlying data is crucial to the value of visualization. How
complete and reliable is it? As with all analytical processes, putting garbage in means getting
garbage out.
• Context: The point of visualization is to make large amounts of data approachable so we can apply
our evolutionarily honed pattern detection computer — i.e., our brain — to draw insights from it.
To do so, we need to access all of the potential relationships of the data elements. This context is
the source of insight. To leave out any contextual information or metadata (or more appropriately,
“metacontent”) is to risk hampering our understanding.
• Biases: The creator of the visualization may influence the semantics of the visualization and the
syntax of the elements of the visualization via color choices, positioning, and visual tricks (such as
unnecessary 3D, or 2D when 3D is more informative) — any of which can challenge the
interpretation of the data. This also creates the risk of “pre-specifying” discoverable features and
results via the embedded algorithms used by the creator (something EDA is intended to overcome).
These in turn can significantly influence how viewers understand the visualization, and what
insight they will gather from it.

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 Ignoring these requirements and risks can undermine the visualization’s purpose and confuse rather
than enlighten.

Visualizing Data

• The Question All Smart Visualizations Should Ask

• What Moleskine’s Market Position Really Looks Like
• The Value of a Good Visual: Immediacy
• It’s Time to Retire “Crap Circles”

Jim Stikeleather serves as Executive Strategist, Innovation for Dell Services, the IT services arm of Dell, where he leads
a team of information technology and business experts who identify, evaluate and assess the potential of new
technologies, business models and processes to address evolving business, economic and social trends.

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This document is authorized for use only in Dr. Saurabh Mittal's PGP14_ADV at Indian Institute of Management - Rohtak from Aug 2024 to Jan 2025.