Speech “Corporate Information Design mit Microsoft” ( “Corporate Information Design with Microsoft” ) by Jörg Knuth of Ceteris AG and HICHERT+FAISST GmbH, at the local meeting of PASS Deutschland e.V., Regionalgruppe Hannover / Göttingen, on 2015-08-13 in Isernhagen, Germany. |
Use “relative frequencies” instead of “likelihood”.
Example: If you are accused to have committed a crime, as your DNA looks like the one found at the crime scene in Berlin, Germany,
With likelihood “The error chance that the DNA is not yours, is 1/100000”, so obviously you claim that the error chance is quite little.
With relative frequencies “In Berlin are 3.4 million residents, so from point of view of statistics, there are 34 people with your DNA, you are just one of them, and one of the 33 others might be the wanted criminal” .
Do not practice neither “defencive decision making” nor “safeguard culture” ( German: “Absicherungskultur” ).
Show percentaged changes and not just absolut values.
Percentaged changes may often best visualized by logarithm scales ( as known from ancient “logarithm paper”, used by engineers in control theory )
Avoid traffic light, where red, yellow, green is automatically assigned to a status according to levels / thresholds.
For visualisation of a graduation of values, do not use colors, but tonal values, as the human viewer can't properly figure out the order of enumeration of colors.
For treemaps, use red-green or yellow-blue as colors.
I was told by experts: Most “special tricks” to make Microsoft Excel graphics look like pretty infographics, is based on the “series” ( “Datenreihe” ) feature.
“Das wichtigste Element im Diagramm ist die Datenreihe-Funktion. Diagramme sind dynamisch, d. h., ändert sich eine Zahl in der Tabelle, wird diese Änderung sofort auch auf das Diagramm übertragen”.
Example for German Microsoft Excel ”=DATENREIHE(Tabelle1!$B$1;Tabelle1!$A$2:$A$7;Tabelle1!$B$2:$B$7;1)”.
The OpenSource Redash, GitHub "Redash " - “Redash helps you make sense of your data. Connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company”.
“Graph visualization” of data by NoSQL graph databases.
“Register to try a free online demo of Linkurious on a pre-configured dataset” - So there is no free ( limited ) download edition, nor a free ( limited ) service for testing.