Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data Review

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Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data ReviewAfter reading this book I have the following positive points to make:
.. It is very well designed, it is nice to look at it.
.. Has some good ideas (but they are not original ones).
.. In general, following its advice you will be able to do a better design of dashboards and management information systems screens.
If I counted only this I would give it 5 stars, but, I think this book has some negative points. One of the points makes the author inconsistent with his own recommendations throughout the book.
The book is about designing dashboards and the major line of thought is:
- keep it simple, clean and objective.
- Use the tools (graphics and tables) in a rational way.
- don't use all the fancy features that software vendors put in their products for they will make your dashboard less effective.
But the author when writing it, forgot part of his own teachings and produced a text that is very prolixic, too many words to explain simple concepts and ideas. Lacks objectivity.
So, if you want to better understand the use of graphs, take a look at Naomi Robbins, "Creating More Effective Graphs". This book is very objective, simple and fast to read.

The second flaw is that in the examples to show how to do a well designed dashboard, the author used two types of graphs that are not available in today's softwares. One type of graph was created by the author while writing this book (bullet graphs) and the other (sparkline) is the creation of Mr.Tufte, which will appear in a future book of his. It would be more useful to see examples with the typical tools available to design a dashboard.So, be prepared for a nice experience with pictures and graphs in a sea of words. It is an excellent book that will help design dashboards and the like. (So far is the best book on this topic).
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data OverviewDashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.
This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how to:

Avoid the thirteen mistakes common to dashboard design
Provide viewers with the information they need quickly and clearly
Apply what we now know about visual perception to the visual presentation of information
Minimize distractions, cliches, and unnecessary embellishments that create confusion
Organize business information to support meaning and usability
Create an aesthetically pleasing viewing experience
Maintain consistency of design to provide accurate interpretation
Optimize the power of dashboard technology by pairing it with visual effectiveness

Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.


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Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment Review

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Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment ReviewThis book allowed me to quickly create some simple applications using the processing API. So, in that respect, the book was successful. However, the book falls short in three respects.
1) One would expect a book with the title "Visualizing Data" to be crammed with pictures showing many different data visualizations. However, this book has relatively few. Every colleague of mine who passed by my desk and picked up the book had the exact same reaction.
2) The processing language is touted as a means for people unfamiliar with programming to get up to speed with visualization. However, I would be very surprised if anyone with little programming experience would get much out of this book.
3) Don't expect to use this book as a reference for the processing language. It is basically just a collection of half explained examples. Consider for example the function smooth(). This function appears in almost every example but forget about trying to find an explanation of what the function does in the book.
The book is probably worth buying to get up to speed quickly but plan on spending a significant amount of time sifting through the processing.org website and other online resources before being able to get anything non-trivial done. And if you don't already know Java then don't expect to accomplish anything even modestly complex without a lot of outside help.
Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment Overview
Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called "Processing". Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you:

The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact
How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details
Several example projects with the code to make them work
Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want to convey about your data set
The book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

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