I love the website
TED. For all of you have not been to this site before, it's a place where people give lectures on various topics on Technology, Entertainment, and Design. You can watch these lectures for free and they are generally very informative and entertaining.
My colleague sent me one on
the beauty of visualization and it didn't disappoint. It brought up a really good point that I don't think is talked about too much in the dashboard world. Dashboards are about visually presenting information at a glance but just as an important point is finding patterns in information. Now effective visualization does not necessarily result in finding patterns but to determine patterns, you need effective visualizations. For example, a SparkLine effectively communicates a trend but it won't show you why the trend is like that. Now, if you take that trend and analyze it with other data that may affect it, that's when you're looking for patterns. To me, this is the most interesting part of dashboards - understanding why.
Keywords:
Data Visualization,
Business Intelligence,
SparkLine,
Dashboards
posted @ Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:33 AM