Thursday, September 18, 2008
Infographics
byThe science and art of infographics is intriguing. An example of an infographic was Monday’s post on Soda vs. Pop statistics. The purpose of infographics is to give people a quick, visual shortcut to understanding the relationship and meaning of many numbers and/or statistics. The New York Times online had a disturbing, but effective interactive infographic yesterday showing the incredible change in one year of the financial sector’s total stock market value and the the carnage of major players involved in that change.
Our own company frequently prepares a form of infographics called dashboards for our clients that allows people to see critical business intelligence information in an easy-to-decipher, at-a-glance visual form. A generic example of a dashboard from Stephen Few at Perceptual Edge is represented below (click to enlarge):
Another interesting political dashboard from yesterday can be found here. It shows the presidential race to be a dead heat from an electoral college perspective.
Data is only useful if it can be turned into information, knowledge and insight. With the vast quantity of information available today, infographics and dashboards are an eminently useful tool for making complex information easier to understand.
