I was lucky enough to attend a seminar by
Edward Tufte in San Francisco yesterday, who is considered the expert in visual information representation. It sounds like a bogus topic, but it's actually very interesting because it applies to almost every field. In fact there was an English professor in the class next to me who found the course very useful. Personally, I need to convey a lot of data on a daily basis for a variety of purposes such as design specifications for clients, training courses and management reports. I think it's quite easy to take for granted that Excel has a set of charts that we can use to represent data, without actually taking a step back and considering what data (the content) we want to convey, and what is the method way to explain that data to the intended audience.
Another interest fact was that Edward Tufte has published 4 books, but none of them have a single graphic that comes even close to what Excel produces. Some of the graphics in his books are drawn by hand, and some are several hundred years old. In fact he produced during the seminar a first edition first print book by
Galileo with some interesting star charts in it, which is also the only place in print that Galileo wrote that he believed the world was round and rotated around the sun. 10 years earlier, someone was burned at the stake for saying the same thing.
So Edward Tufte's theories are all very conceptual and fundamentals, rather than being instructions for how to produce a certain graphic to achieve a certain outcome. He encourages the audience to take a step back and have creative ideas on the most effective way to present data.
Edward Tufte was also employed by NASA briefly to analyse the
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. NASA produced the reports on what happened, and they asked Edward Tufte to analyse the quality of the reports to ensure that nothing was missed. He found a total cluster of PowerPoint presentations that were prepared by marketing teams, with no real content. So the Columbia story was never told effectively because the data just wasn't represented. NASA spent billions (literally) on the Columbia disaster and avoiding the same disaster for future launches, but it was totally compromised by an obsession with Microsoft PowerPoint.
During the seminar we covered a number of theories, which I'll explain below. That I use the term "graphic" instead of "charts". Charts have become ubiquitous with information representation, and narrow in their methods. Graphics open up a whole range of options to convey information.
Make it about the content
Forget all the noise that Excel puts into charts. Forget drop shadows. Forget boxes around names. Street directories don't put boxes around names, so why do we do it on an organisational chart? Edward Tufte said during the presentation yesterday "Really good design is self-effacing. It's entirely about the content."
Most of the time, people put all of the other guff/noise into their graphics because either they don't know how to use Excel properly, or they're hiding the fact that they don't really have much of a story to tell. It's much better to have a simple graphic that tells the story effectively, then expand the graphic as your skill in data analysis and representation grows.
Give credit to the audience
Edward Tufte said "Forget knowing your audience. Know your content, convey it clearly and respect your audience's intelligence". He reminded us that millions of Americans every day read the sports section of the paper, which will usually contain hundreds of numbers formatted in a variety of ways in a fairly small section. The same applies for sharemarket prices in Australia. So why then when we present statistics during a PowerPoint presentation, do we "dumb down" the content to only 15 numbers in a table? Or one line in a chart? The human brain is capable of understanding much higher resolution information than that, we've just developed a culture of turning our PowerPoint presentations into cartoons. This is a real concept that Edward Tufte talked about - the "cartoon graphic". Those graphics are full of colourful lines and borders and drop shadows, but their real data plays second fiddle to the decoration.
Stop relying on PowerPoint
If you have to do a presentation, use PowerPoint as the presentation medium, and that's all. Don't make colourful slides that don't successfully present the real content. Tell the audience verbally, and show them complex graphics that they can take some time to understand. Even
Steve Ballmer has stopped using PowerPoint. In reponse to the interview question "What's it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer", he said:
The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven't seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call "the long and winding road." You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. I decided that's not what I want to do anymore. I don't think it's productive. I don't think it's efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: "I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck."
Present your reports in Word. Hand the report out to attendees, then show some key graphics on a PowerPoint presentation and talk about them instead.
Making a graphic more complex shouldn't make it harder to understand
The concept of a "complex graphic" will scare most people. They want their graphics able to be understood in 5 seconds. By adding more information to a graphic we don't necessarily have to make it harder to understand, as long as we make the effort to design the graphic well. Don't take for granted the fact that graphics are hard to write. Usually much harder than text. But their benefit is that in the same amount of space, they can convey much more information that text could possibly convey. Edward Tufte said "In visual design, 1+1=3. The way that two elements on a page interact with each other effectively creates a third element". Use this concept to include exponentially more information in a single graphic.
Include a super-graphic
To read one sheet of A4 paper it might take a couple of minutes. Why then, when we place a graphic (or chart) on the page, does that chart usually take 5 seconds to understand? Have we dumbed down the page just because we're conveying the information visually? It's much better to produce a well designed half-page graphic that takes one minute to read, but can contain enough information from several pages of text. This is what Edward Tufte calls the "super-graphic". There should always be one super-graphic in every presentation. The super-graphic allows your audience to effectively absorb what you are trying to tell them, and it allows them to understand the graphic at their own page. Ensure that a printed copy of the super-graphic is available to the audience, so they can take their own time to understand it.
Conclusion
There were a number of other theories that Edward Tufte discussed during the seminar, which I won't repeat here. If anyone is interested in hearing more about it, you can speak to me anytime!
*********************** The End ***************************************
