User Interface Blog

The current issue of DMReview features the winners of the 2005 data visualization competition. Participants were given the opportunity to showcase their data visualizations in the final event of the competition.

These are the only instructions for the participants: This scenario is not prescribed. You may present any real-world data and message that can be addressed through a data visualization. It may be a graph, a dashboard, or any other visual presentation of quantitative data. This is your opportunity to showcase a data visualization of which you are particularly proud.

The winning solution was presented by Jock Mackinlay - director of interface design - of Tableau Software. The data visualization was designed to help a video game company analyze its competitors’ advertising strategies.

Jock’s description: What are the advertising strategies of my competitors? A company required a competitive analysis comparing the weekend TV advertising strategies of different companies in the video game industry. The companies have similar overall strategies with more ads running Sunday evening than Saturday evening. However, EA Sports stands out as having an unusual advertising strategy: running a lot of low cost, 15-second cable TV spots throughout the weekend with several high cost, 30-second network TV spots Sunday afternoon. The motivation was immediately clear: live Sunday sports broadcasts are an ideal advertising venue for sports video games.

The following quote is the conclusion of the final event results:

As long as business intelligence software vendors continue to market flash and dazzle and spend their time adding features that are seldom useful rather than developing software that works seamlessly as an extension of human perception and intelligence, most BI users will continue to waste much of their time on window dressing rather than squeezing valuable insights out of their data. Most - but not all. You can choose to be an exception.

I totally agree with the conclusion. Most important for a good data visualization application is not a good window dressing but rather a valuable insight view of the data to be analyzed.