Comments on: Data Visualization — Few’s Examples

By: Hans

Hans — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:47:50 +0000

Stephen Few does a great job and these examples are very useful. Note that Few found a very effective way to communicate data presentation and visualization techniques. As a professor, I have my business intelligence students use the Few examples to understand how to critique existing cases. This process helps them to understand the impact of certain design decisions – the impact on the business user. Ultimately presentation and visualization techniques are meant to communicate information – to the business – not to IT. The Few cases, and the overall approach they embody, have proven to be very effective in an academic setting.

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:31:30 +0000

@RU Kidding Obviously, I’m a big fan of Stephen Few — not based on his academic credentials, but based on the fact that he has taken a fairly methodical approach to applying the principles laid out by Tufte, combined with common sense. Maybe that’s dumbing things down too much, but when I compare Few-less, unguided data visualizations with data visualization that has employed some of the basic principles he espouses…it seems like things get a whole lot more clear.

I’ve seen very little out-and-out criticism of Few. I’d love to broaden my perspective to understand where he misses the mark.

By: RU Kidding

RU Kidding — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:49:29 +0000

First, S. Few has an MS degree in relgious studies, w/no training in a relevant field. Next, he was written 3 books, 2 are self-published including the latest one (Analytics Press is a company of 1, look it up on DBS), the one by O’Reilly contains nothing beyond a ch.2 of a typical statistics book on information display. He uses the fallacy of expert by association using name dropping of true experts like Tufte, etc, who have done actual research, which Few apparently has not (I assume since he did not refute the challenge on his blog and no research can be found w/ his name on it). Since Jon needs a simple explanation apparantly (i.e. non-academic), perhaps its a good book for you, but I hope you are not in charge of designing interfaces that “must work” in the real world.

By: Dashboard Development and Unleashing Creative Juices | Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:32:21 +0000

[...] and, I suspect, in Goodman’s) is Few’s Information Dashboard Design (which I’ve written about before). Data visualization is one of those areas where spending just an hour or two understanding some [...]

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:22:57 +0000

I like Stephen Few's books, because unlike Edward Tufte, Few has a pragmatic approach. He knows that we're not all academicians, that we have to knock things out quickly, and that we don't have Illustrator etc. on our desktops, much less time to learn and use such fancy packages. Few's other book, Information Dashboard Design, applies these lessons directly to effective displays of business information.

By: Kamran

Kamran — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:29:09 +0000

Those examples really were good, well bad and good. I need to go look at some of the slides I’ve created and fix them up. Guess I also have a new book to add to the reading list.