The other day, Dashboard Spy pointed out Dundas - a provider of Data Visualization solutions using .net and Flash.

I took a peek at their solution gallery and about the best thing I can say is that these are polished examples. Dundas obviously went to a great deal of trouble to develop examples that would appeal to a stereo-typical marketer (wow! wouldn’t these look great in a presentaton!).

But just because a report design is polished doesn’t mean that it’s any good at conveying information. Take for example their ‘3-D’ line chart. ‘3-D’ lines are a bad idea to begin with as the prespective tends to skew the data and makes understanding difficult, but the animation also distracts and slows down (literally because we have to wait for the data to load in) understanding. The one useful bit of information in the chart is the highlight on the month of July - except we don’t know why it is highlighted - what’s so important about July?

Here are a couple of tips:
1. Don’t use 3-D charts unless your data is three dimensional (has an x,y and z coordinate)
2. Provide context (specific chart title, x-axis and y-axis labels) even if you think the definition of the data is implicit or as in the above, it’s ‘dummy data’ - context supports understanding. Without context we’re left scratching our heads, wondering what to make of it.

Post Script: Dundas’ solutons may be wonderful (I wouldn’t know) but I think their pitch (e.g. their .NET Gallery) is not well targeted. Folks who are serious about visual reporting (and thus likely to convert for the right tool) probably won’t be any more fond of their examples than I was. Always put your best foot forward.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 9:32 pm and is filed under charts, graphs, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.