Few in Review
Dealer Diagnostics traveled to Boston, June 24 - 26, to attend Stephen Few’s three day data visualization training, The 2008 East Coast Visual Business Intelligence Workshop.
Has the business intelligence field been more successful at building expectations or falling short of them? This question will cause any professional in the industry to pause for thought. When your correspondent had the opportunity to travel to Boston to take part in a three day data visualization workshop lead by dashboard guru Stephen Few, it was easy to imagine that the only happy ending might be a half-dozen oysters at the Union Oyster Bar and maybe a trip to Fenway. As a long-time reader of Few, the skeptic in me couldn’t help but imagine sitting through three days of material that was well covered in his existing books. Fortunately, that’s exactly what it was.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
– George Orwell
His first words were “What I’m going to show you today is not complex.” And it’s not, everyone in attendance knew it. Most in the class had read his books or at least his blog and newsletter and knew that this stuff isn’t rocket science–just bars, lines and tables. Would we be spending the workshop learning things that we already knew?
The workshops structured each day as a separate course, each priced at $350.
Day 1: Table and Graph Design for Effective Communication was based on his first book, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.
Day 2: Dashboard Design for at a Glance Monitoring was based on his second book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.
Day 3: Visual Data Analysis for Discovery and Understanding was based on third, soon to be released, book, Now you See It.
While the material separation may have been useful to those with scheduling, budget issues or a narrow interest in presenting data in a table, it seemed unnecessary as almost everyone attended all three days. Each day was structured with a morning of lecture based theory, including a small group exercise, followed by additional afternoon theory and an interactive activity with the entire class. Few used many of the same examples that he presents in his books in addition to a few charts and dashboard examples that have been developed since each book’s publishing. However, if the message had any chance of being lost in familiarity, he brought it back again and again.
Stephen Few is an outstanding presenter. If he doesn’t already have a reputation as one of the best educators in the field, he’s certainly on his way to building it. Clearly, concisely and ever-so-smoothly Few walked a class of 65 through three days of his material without notes. His pacing and delivery were superb as was his ability to interact with the audience.
Each morning he covered basic theory and then offered the chance to critique poorly executed graphs and dashboards from software vendors. Just when the class was beginning to feel arrogant, Few would split the class into small groups and ask us to redesign a deceptive graph or misleading dashboard. There was more than one group thinking, “wait a minute, I was an expert in this a minute ago. Now what do I do?” Once Few had us back in the lecture hall and reviewed the exercise, you could sense the “aha” moments around the room when what we thought were familiar concepts became deeper insights.
At the end of each day, Few asked the class, “was anything I covered today complex?”, as a not so subtle reminder of where we had started with all of the data and limited insight.
Days earlier we walked into the workshop knowing everything Few was going to present yet after looking at samples of our work we realized that we had not learned many of the lessons: dashboards were complex enough to sell the idea to the boss, but all too often failed on the basics–choosing an appropriate color to best aid perception for instance or reducing graphical clutter, however brilliantly conceived by an analyst.
Few, with his mantra of simplicity, helped focus even the most experienced mind on improving the basics and letting the data tell its story.
