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

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

Arts & Photography

Few, Stephen

Photography & Video

O'Reilly Media

Most presentations of quantitative information are poorly designed—painfully so, often to the point of misinformation. This problem, however, is rarely noticed and even more rarely addressed. We use tables and graphs to communicate quantitative information: the critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the future of our organizations. Even the best information is useless, however, if its story is poorly told. This problem exists because almost no one has ever been trained to design tables and graphs for effective and efficient communication. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten is the most accessible, practical, and comprehensive guide to table and graph design available. The second edition of Show Me the Numbers improves on the first by polishing the content throughout (including updated figures) and adding 91 more pages of content, including: 1) A new preface; 2) A new chapter entitled "Silly Graphs That Are Best Forsaken," which alerts readers to some of the current misuses of graphs such as donut charts, circle charts, unit charts, and funnel charts; 3) A new chapter about quantitative narrative entitled "Telling Compelling Stories with Numbers"; and 4) New appendices entitled "Constructing Table Lens Displays in Excel," "Constructing Box Plots in Excel," and "Useful Color Palettes."

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Analytics Press

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis teaches simple, practical means to explore and analyze quantitative data--techniques that rely primarily on using your eyes. This book features graphical techniques that can be applied to a broad range of software tools, including Microsoft Excel, because so many people have nothing else, but also more powerful visual analysis tools that can dramatically extend your analytical reach. You'll learn to make sense of quantitative data by discerning the meaningful patterns, trends, relationships, and exceptions that measure your organization's performance, identify potential problems and opportunities, and reveal what will likely happen in the future. Now You See It is not just for those with "analyst" in their titles, but for everyone who's interested in discovering the stories in their data that reveal their organization's performance and how it can be improved.

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis

Tables and graphs can more adequately communicate important business information when they reflect the good design practices discussed in this practical guide to effective table and graph design. Information is provided on the fundamental concepts of table and graph design, the numbers and knowledge most suitable for display in a graphic form, the best tabular means to communicate certain ideas, and the component-level aspects of design. Analysts, technicians, and managers will appreciate the solid theory behind this outline for ensuring that tables and graphs present quantitative business information in a truthful, attractive format that facilitates better decision making.

Science & Math

Mathematics

A leader in the field of data visualization, Stephen Few exposes the common problems in dashboard design and describes its best practices in great detail and with a multitude of examples in this updated second edition. According to the author, dashboards have become a popular means to present critical information at a glance, yet few do so effectively. He purports that when designed well, dashboards engage the power of visual perception to communicate a dense collection of information efficiently and with exceptional clarity and that visual design skills that address the unique challenges of dashboards are not intuitive but rather learned. The book not only teaches how to design dashboards but also gives a deep understanding of the concepts—rooted in brain science—that explain the why behind the how. This revised edition offers six new chapters with sections that focus on fundamental considerations while assessing requirements, in-depth instruction in the design of bullet graphs and sparklines, and critical steps to follow during the design process. Examples of graphics and dashboards have been updated throughout, including additional samples of well-designed dashboards.

Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring

In this age of so-called Big Data, organizations are scrambling to implement new software and hardware to increase the amount of data they collect and store. However, in doing so they are unwittingly making it harder to find the needles of useful information in the rapidly growing mounds of hay. If you don't know how to differentiate signals from noise, adding more noise only makes things worse. When we rely on data for making decisions, how do we tell what qualifies as a signal and what is merely noise? In and of itself, data is neither. Assuming that data is accurate, it is merely a collection of facts. When a fact is true and useful, only then is it a signal. When it's not, it's noise. It's that simple. In Signal, Stephen Few provides the straightforward, practical instruction in everyday signal detection that has been lacking until now. Using data visualization methods, he teaches how to apply statistics to gain a comprehensive understanding of one's data and adapts the techniques of Statistical Process Control in new ways to detect not just changes in the metrics but also changes in the patterns that characterize data.

Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise

Computers & Technology

Big Data, Big Dupe is a little book about a big bunch of nonsense. The story of David and Goliath inspires us to hope that something little, when armed with truth, can topple something big that is a lie. This is the author's hope. While others have written about the dangers of Big Data, Stephen Few reveals the deceit that belies its illusory nature. If "data is the new oil," Big Data is the new snake oil. It isn't real. It's a marketing campaign that has distracted us for years from the real and important work of deriving value from data. Big Data, Big Dupe gives a voice to the small army of data professionals who work silently and unheralded in the trenches to make sense of data. Data professionals (data analysts, statisticians, etc.) struggle to maintain focus amidst the constant distraction of Big Data nonsense. They recognize Big Data for what it is: a meaningless term, but also a well-funded marketing campaign that sends organizations on costly and wasteful pursuits. As IT vendors, consultants, and many academics sing the praises of Big Data, the real work of data sensemaking is being done by seasoned professionals using skills that they developed through years of study and practice. These skills existed long before the nonsense of Big Data arose. If you're one of these seasoned data professionals, buy this book, confirm that it speaks your truth, and then place copies on the desks of those whose foolish IT strategy and purchasing decisions are wasting your time and subverting your efforts. Data holds great promise, but that promise will forever remain unfulfilled by those who pursue the Big Data illusion rather than investing in the time-proven skills and hard work of data sensemaking.

Big Data, Big Dupe: A little book about a big bunch of nonsense

Programming

Contrary to popular myth, we do not yet live in the "Information Age." At best, we live the "Data Age," obsessed with the production, collection, storage, dissemination, and monetization of digital data. But data, in and of itself, isn't valuable. Data only becomes valuable when we make sense of it. We rely on "information professionals" to help us understand data, but most fail in their efforts. Why? Not because they lack intelligence or tools, but mostly because they lack the necessary skills. Most information professionals have been trained primarily in the use of data analysis tools (Tableau, PowerBI, Qlik, SAS, Excel, R, etc.), but even the best tools are only useful in the hands of skilled individuals. Anyone can pick up a hammer and pound a nail, but only skilled carpenters can use a hammer to build a reliable structure. Making sense of data is skilled work, and developing those skills requires study and practice. Weaving data into understanding involves several distinct but complementary thinking skills. Foremost among them are critical thinking and scientific thinking. Until information professionals develop these capabilities, we will remain in the dark ages of data. This book is for information professionals, especially those who have been thrust into this important work without having a chance to develop these foundational skills. If you're an information professional and have never been trained to think critically and scientifically with data, this book will get you started. Once on this path, you'll be able to help usher in an Information Age worthy of the name.

The Data Loom: Weaving Understanding by Thinking Critically and Scientifically with Data

Before you can present information to others, you must understand its story. 
Now You See It teaches the concepts, principles, and practices of visual data sensemaking. The skills taught in this book rely primarily on something that most of us possess—vision—interactively using graphs to find and examine the meaningful patterns and relationships that reside in quantitative data. Although some questions about quantitative data can only be answered using sophisticated statistical techniques, most can be answered using relatively simple visual data sensemaking skills. Until 
 Now You See It was published, no book taught these basic skills comprehensively and in a way that was accessible to a broad audience. Even though these skills can be developed by anyone with eyes to see, they are not intuitive—they must be learned. Without these skills, even the best data visualization tools are of little use, and data will remain nothing but noise.

Now You See It: An Introduction to Visual Data Sensemaking

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Few, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Few, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Few, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring

Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise

Big Data, Big Dupe: A little book about a big bunch of nonsense

The Data Loom: Weaving Understanding by Thinking Critically and Scientifically with Data

Now You See It: An Introduction to Visual Data Sensemaking