Top all-time · #1085
Visual Business Intelligence
Personal blog · perceptualedge.com/blogdatadesign
Visual Business Intelligence is a personal blog at perceptualedge.com about data and design. Since 2008, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Often recommended · 19 of 36 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Stephen Few's Perceptual Edge for critiques and guidance on data visualization and dashboard design, including essays against pie charts and gauges, plus his books and library of articles.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 36 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-03-12
- Save the Pies for Dessert [pdf]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-09-13
- Save the Pies for Dessert [pdf]4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-10
- Practical rules for using colors and effects in charts4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-08-19
- /examples.php3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-04-14
- Save the Pies for Dessert – effective visualization [pdf]3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-02-08
- /articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-27
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-23
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-19
What Hacker News says?
Great article! Another nice resource for picking colors in data visualizations is from Stephen Few: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...
Comment linking /articles/visual_business_intelligence/rules_for_using_color.pdf
on “Common color mistakes and how to avoid them”Submitted O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul as a story · 440 points
HN discussionYep. I love design and creative ideas, but they still have to be efficient. This just makes me waste my time compared to a table where I can sort/filter by different criteria. Most of the time, "creative" visualizations tend to actually obscure meaning, or worse, mislead viewers. Recommended reading: Show me the numbers by Stephen Few (his blog is also great: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/ )
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?”Submitted The Myth of Self-Service Analytics as a story · 51 points
HN discussionI love histogram sliders! I think they were originally developed by Chris Ahlberg in Ben Shneiderman's group, and were later commercialized in Spotfire (I have yet to see them in any other infoviz system except Panopticon - https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=965 ). Jeff Heer did some work a few decades to generalize into 'scented widget' ( http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/scented-widgets ). With systems like DuckD…
Comment linking /blog/?p=965
on “Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences”Submitted Time on the Horizon – Graphing time series on one line (2008) [pdf] as a story · 28 points
HN discussionJust a note that pie charts are not well regarded in this application. Stephen Few, “Save the Pies for Dessert” ( https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_inte... ) Edward Tufte, “The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them.” The “1% other” is more compelling.
Comment linking /articles/visual_business_intelligence/save_the_pies_for_dessert.pdf
on “The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive”Submitted Are You a Data Scientist? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's encouraging to read this having read Stephen Few's blog post "O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul"[1] earlier this year about his troubles publishing Information Dashboard Design through O’Reilly Media and choosing to publish the second edition without them and how difficult they made it. [1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521
Comment linking /blog/?p=1521
on “Tim O'Reilly: How I Failed”Submitted What's Wrong With Academic Publishing as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThey arn't. Stephen Few wrote a really good book a few (ha!) years back called 'Information Dashboard Design' (0596100167) which addressed the issue of circular dials and gauges. Here is a good essay on the subject by Stephen Few ( http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf ). Basically, it boils down to the same arguments put forward by Tufte et al. It is far easier to compare horizontal or vertical positi…
Comment linking /articles/08-21-07.pdf
on “Perfectum Dashboard”Submitted O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI suggests everyone read these whitepapers on dashboard design. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard... http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pi... The author also has written a great book on dashboard design. Operations dashboards are essential for any (tech?) company. Business dashboards are another beast all together.
Comment linking /articles/Whitepapers/Common_Pitfalls.pdf
on “Your Startup Needs a Dashboard”Submitted The Perceptual and Cognitive Limits of Multivariate Data Visualization as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable. The tradeoff used to be that if you'd go to a publisher they'd do your marketing. Every creative type I know of is not only utterly n00bish when it comes to marketing but also regards it as a disease you wouldn't touch with a long pole. But these days even famous publishers expect authors to do their own marketing [1]. Every last bit of it. So y…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1521
on “My Amazon bestseller made me nothing”Submitted Linear Fractions as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd I just raised $27,000 to fund writing my first book [1]. I'm a first time author and despite my best efforts agents and publishers wouldn't touch the project. The world is changing rapidly, and traditional publishing just doesn't make sense for many authors anymore. Also of course refer to the recent discussion on O'Reilly's changing practices [2]. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/605480326/beyond-connect…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1521
on “My Amazon bestseller made me nothing”Submitted The Unprecedented is Overrated as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGood stuff, thanks for the links. Especially Felton's course page has several good references that were new to me. Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type [1] seems a fun read. Great designs also on the competition page [2]. [1] http://thinkingwithtype.com/ [2] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1374
Comment linking /blog/?p=1374
on “Information Dashboard Design, 2nd Edition”Submitted Information Visualization Research as Pseudo-Science [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionStephen Few actually self publishes for reasons he explains here: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521 I'm not sure why he hasn't made an ebook though. This is a new release so it may be coming.
Comment linking /blog/?p=1521
on “Information Dashboard Design, 2nd Edition”Submitted Save the Pies for Dessert [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ http://www.perceptualedge.com/ I've read books by both these authors and they were very good. Their websites cover most of the important content found in the books.
Comment linking /
on “Data looks better naked”Submitted Practical rules for using colors and effects in charts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionStephen Few has pretty good books on the topic: http://www.perceptualedge.com/ He is very good at explaining Tufte's work. The best part of his books and website are comparisons between a typical charts or dashboards and his re-designs. Following is more relevant, his article on pie charts (PDF): http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
Comment linking /articles/08-21-07.pdf
on “Please don't use pie charts”Submitted Big Data, Bad Math: Gartner Consults Its Crystal Ball as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've done quite a bit of reading about digital dashboards, and agree. The first example in "Information Dashboard Design" is filled with gauges - and an explanation of why it's a bad design. Edward Tufte's books are absolutely amazing, and filled with beautiful visualizations: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi . Stephen Few has several books on dashboards/charting that are really practical. See http://www…
Comment linking /examples.php
on “Canvas Gauges”Submitted Should Data Visualizations Be Beautiful? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe same reason that pie charts are not very effective - it's relatively hard to make comparisons between angles instead of lengths like in a bar chart. It's probably even harder with a doughnut. Here is a PDF article by Stephen Few about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
Comment linking /articles/08-21-07.pdf
on “Whatever It Takes: Visualizations in E-mail with d3.js”Submitted BP Using Misleading Charts to Show Improvement in Cleanup Efforts as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
