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Interview with Brian Suda on Designing with Data

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:52:36 +0000

Scrunchup interviews Brian Suda on his recently published 5 Simple Steps book called Designing with Data

Listen to the interview

Audio transcript

Anna So today I’m talking to Brian Suda who’s just published a book under Five Simple Steps called A Practical Guide to Designing with Data. So could you tell us a bit about what it is and who it’s aimed at?

Brian Sure. The book is called Designing with Data. Originally we were kicking the idea around of calling it Designing with Statistics, but that was a bit probably too heavy for most people, so we went with the alliteration and talked about Designing with Data.

This kind of stemmed out of just seeing lots and lots of bad charts and bad design here and there from just people churning out pedestrian Excel graphs. I mean I’ve seen local newspapers which write…spend loads and loads of time copy editing and obviously printing and laying things out, and then just have this horrible pie-chart smack there right next to the article. And there’s lots and lots of books about visualisations and how to make these really cool; flow diagrams and all this sort of really artsy appealing stuff, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of really just basic how to get a bar chart; when do you use a line graph; when do you… what’s the difference between a pie chart and a doughnut chart, so we sat down with the Five Simple Steps team and we kind of hammered out, the rough twenty five chapters on what we kind of wanted to see in the book and we finessed it a little bit and went from there.

Anna I mean the thing that I noticed is that you barely ever use the word infographic, but it’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, so why have you chosen to stay away from this?

Brian I think it’s a bit like, you know, any discipline; to get to being able to design and develop visualisations and infographics, you can’t just jump in at the deep end. You’ve really got to learn the basics and what I tried to do in the book is just cover some of the basics such as when do you use colours and why do you use colours and what can they be used for, calling out data or highlighting different parts of a charge in a graph.

I think once you’ve become expert at just generating really well thought-out and well designed bar charts and line graphs, which if those can tell your story really well, then you can move onto infographics and visualisations.

Anna I like the bit where you put…”if I find you’re using doughnut charts, I’ll hunt you down”.

Brian Yes, those are… I think that’s a horrible sort of feature-creep function. I’m sure somewhere, in some version of Excel, some guy was using pie-charts, and said “What if we put a hole in the middle of it and call it a doughnut graph?” and it’s…once you put a button in there, you can’t take it out and it stuck around in loads of successive versions.

Anna I’m still waiting for bagel-charts! So why is it important to present data in this way?

Brian I think lots of reasons. People forget that charts or graphs are complementing the article, the story, but at the same time, they’re telling a story themselves, and you’re always going to be introducing your own bias and your own view on the data by both what you include and what you don’t include.

I mean maybe you’re doing fiscal charts: how much money the company’s made year after year or even for your website: how many visits do you get month by month, hour by hour, and you’re always trying to tell a story, so if you can be able to create good charts and graphs, it’s all about how to….better story telling.

Anna You talk a bit about things like chart junk and data to pixel ratio, so could you explain what these are and how they help people make good charts?

Brian Sure. A while ago, Edward Tufty coined the term “data junk”, and he talked a lot about ink to data ratio, and in his book, ink to data ratio is the amount of ink that’s used versus the amount of ink that is actually representing data, so on a standard kind of bar chart, you’ve got labels, you’ve got some axis grid lines; those aren’t actually data. Those are just there because it’s part of the framework. Then you spend the ink to actually draw the bar charts, so you get some sort of ratio on the amount of ink that’s used to make the data versus the total ink.

But on the web and on-line and on computers, we don’t think about ink, because ink doesn’t cost money, so I went with the idea of pixel to data ratio, which is just the number of pixels being used to represent data versus the number of pixels used overall in the chart. So when you get the chart junk, that’s just when you end up using loads and loads and loads of pixels which aren’t necessarily advancing the data at all.

Anna I guess this could be applied to web design as well. I mean now we’ve got things like iPhones and iPads, it’s so important to only show the most important information. So do you think there are common practices in designing with data and designing websites?

Brian I think there’s a lot….again it’s when you’re doing charts and graphs, you are telling a story. And I guess when you’re developing a website, you are trying to display some sort of…this is my brand, this is the story about my company or about myself that I want to tell. Sometimes that might be lots of colour and lots of flash and lots of random junk. But maybe that’s the story you want to tell.

With data, I guess you’re always wanting to make it easy for the person to actually understand the values and the numbers and what it means. On the web I guess you’re trying to do that as well. If you’re a company, you’re trying to make it easy for people to contact you or buy your product.

Anna So you cover accessibility as well in your book. So what problems can people have in reading a chart and what steps can designers take to make the visualisations more accessible?

Brian There’s a whole chapter that I talk about with colour. Mostly we forget about that on the web, we can represent whatever it is, 16.7 million different colours. But that doesn’t mean that everyone can actually see all of them.

So in the book I kind of break it down, all the different types of colour blinds and disabilities where you might actually, if you say check out this red line, that’s our annual growth, and someone who’s red-green colour blind just might see two shades of murky brown or something like that, so kind of addressing some of those issues as well as I don’t have a colour printer. I just have a boring black and white laser printer, so if you also make this really nice, crazy visualisation where colours and mean heat maps and stuff, when you print it out, it’s completely lost.

Anna Are there any websites that you think do this really badly, specifically?

Brian Not off the top of my head.

Anna Are any that do it really well?

Brian Again, not off the top of my head. There’s lots of tools out there. It’s probably one of those things that if it’s done well, you don’t actually notice, because if it’s done well, you don’t refer to “see the blue chart” or “see this in green”. The person just says “the third line” or “the thick line” or “the line that starts with X” or something like that, where that might have been a logical…they’ve thought that through because of an accessibility issue, or it might just have been dumb luck that they didn’t use colour and therefore it is accessible, so I guess it’s hard to tell. When done well, you don’t even notice it.

Anna Yes, I guess it’s something you’ve really got to bear in mind, especially with things like say pie-charts and line graphs as well.

Brian Yes. Especially like with pie-charts when you print those out, if you’ve got a light blue and maybe a light green next to each other, when they all just print out in grey, all of a sudden you’ve lost where the division is.

Anna Yes, and it’s lost all meaning

Brian Yes, exactly. So that’s one of the bigger issues I guess with accessibility. And that affects everybody.

Anna Oh yes. And you talk a bit about the new technology that developers use. Things like Canvas so they can start creating their own charts using live data. So what have you found that’s out there and how far have we come from where we used to be?

Brian Most recently I’ve been playing quite a lot with SVG and that comes partly because in the book, we needed to be able to make a nice pdf which would be seen on screen, but at the same time, it’s going to be printed in a proper print book, and therefore the dpi is going to be much, much higher. I think on screen it’s 72 to 96 dots per inch, pixels per inch, but in print it’ll be 300 or more, so the quality is quite high, and therefore I was playing around a lot with SVG in vectors.

I think on the web as well, SVG is becoming more and more commonplace as more browsers are supporting it, so we can do nicer, smoother curves and graphs, so when people do zoom in or zoom out, or even print it, they get a much higher quality.

Anna And what did people used to do to show charts? Did they just put a screen-shot in or….

Brian That…I mean Google chart api has been a wonder. I’ve used it as well, but it just generates gif images or pngs, so….well there’s also a Flash version as well, which works great because you just throw it some values and it gives you a chart back, but that does mean that you are limited to what they give you and it’s going to print as a 72 dpi bar chart unless you make it really, really big, then scale it down for print.

Anna Cool. So what was the process like for writing the book? Did you set your own deadlines? Was it quite difficult to get everything in, or did you find it quite easy?

Brian I tried lots of different things. The Five Simple Steps team was really great in that we took it little by little and we tried to have just monthly phone calls, just to kind of check in and see where everything was. We also didn’t know exactly when everything was going to unfold, because they were lining up all these other authors and they didn’t know when they wanted my book out exactly, so in the beginning, we didn’t have a final deadline. But it’s also very nice because it is Five Simple Steps. It’s five sections, and within each section there’s five chapters, so it makes it very easy for me to just sit down and say, OK, today I’m going to write two thousand words for Chapter 1, and you know, we were shooting for…the book ended up to be forty three thousand words.

We were shooting for somewhere in the ball-part of forty to fifty thousand, so that means about two thousand words per chapter, which is kind of just a long blog post. So that’s kind of how I was always thinking about it. Like, OK, today I’m going to focus on Chapter 1 and I’m going to try and write two thousand words. Then tomorrow I’m going to maybe take Chapter 10, or if I find some great links, I’ll read up on them and see, you know, maybe something I read sparked my imagination and I’ll pick a random chapter and just kind of work on that. But it was really nice just to be able to sub-divide it into twenty five blog posts, as opposed to one book.

Anna Sounds a lot more manageable when you put it like that.

Brian Yes. And I don’t think there would’ve been any other way I could’ve managed to do it.

Anna So what route did you take to get where you are? Did you go to University and what would you recommend to people who want to do what you do?

Brian I’m not even 100% sure what I do, so….I went to school originally in the US. I was studying Computer Science and Software Systems, so I understand…I’m a classically trained programmer. I understand project management and estimations and Agile and all the sorts of these different methodologies.

I worked for a year, year and a half for a very small company. It was a lot of fun; I really enjoyed it, and then I moved to Edinburgh up in Scotland where I studied Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and did my Masters.

Informatics is still one of those weird terms that no one is 100% sure what it means and it means slightly different things to slightly different companies and universities, but it was a good opportunity for me, because I studied a little bit of artificial intelligence, dug a little deeper in databases, did some more kind of project management courses, did an entrepreneur course, so…it was good and it was a full one year extra Masters, but I think it was like eight different classes, and there was all sorts of different things, so it worked out really, really well and I got my feet wet in a lot of different things.

From there, then I moved here to Iceland and I’ve kind of been working for various companies since, doing some start-up companies here and there but basically I’m just quite curious, and I love learning more and more things, so I’m always reading, I’m always….I’ve got hundreds of things in my RSS reader, checking those every once in a while, just trying to stay current, as well as contributing back because anyone can read loads and loads of stuff and that’s great. But unless you kind of formulate your own ideas and just get out there and volunteer and…I’ll write and article for this, I’ll do an interview here and there, and then people will comment about your stuff. Some people will be, “oh this is great, thank you very much, I didn’t know you could do this with CSS3”, or whatever. It’s both a good feeling for you because people are actually using some of your stuff as well as you’re contributing knowledge back to the community, and you’re learning stuff yourself, because someone is definitely going to comment, and be like “could be a little faster if you did this”, or “actually, this doesn’t work in this browser” or all sorts of different things, and you continually learn both from other people criticising your own stuff.

Anna So is there quite a big geek community in Iceland?

Brian Well Iceland’s not that big to start with, but there is a good core group of people here who always like to meet up and chat and it’s good because it’s so small, you can just send a direct message to somebody and get your problem solved pretty quick.

Anna So having the internet there it’s really nice to keep in touch with people?

Brian Yes.

Anna So I guess my final question is, what next? Have you got any more books lined up? Are you doing any speaking?

Brian Not at the moment. I think I’m going to take a little time off from writing massive books, but it’s probably just moved into promotion mode, so always going to be writing more and more articles, try and just talk about ideas in the book and then continue to refine it. I posted a few links here and there. The book has a website, designingwithdata.com

Anna I was just about to ask you the link for that.

Brian So as I find new things or contradictory things, I’ll continue to past them there. I just wrote a quick short little article for Fifty Two Weeks of UX.com talking a bit more about chart junk, which isn’t in the book, so that’s the other problem with books: there are deadlines so as new stuff comes in, you’ve just got to be like…it’s not going to make it into the book.

Anna And also I guess it’s only five sections as well.

Brian I could ramble all day long on doughnut charts, but got to cut it off somewhere.

Anna Well it’s been really great talking to you.

Brian Yes, it’s been fun

Anna Thank you so much for joining me.

Brian Thank you very much.

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Let’s Get Personal – Some Interview Advice for Students

admin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:49:58 +0000

For a number of years now I’ve been involved in providing careers advice to students. Schools and colleges seem to be a lot better nowadays at bringing in people from industry to provide advice, rather than the situation when I was at school where much of my advice on a career in advertising came from my German teacher.

Take away the hours spent sitting at tables in echoing school / college halls, confused attempts at assembling exhibition panels and the embarrassing spells when no-one wants to speak to you, it has all been a very rewarding experience.

Variously I’m speaking to students who are looking at A level choices, HND or BTEC choices or degree choices. And in almost all cases I find that the careers advice given to students is getting better. It really is. What I find quite remarkably lacking though, is good interview advice.

Students looking to win a place in Further or Higher education generally need to win over an admissions tutor or two, demonstrating that they have flair enough to respond to teaching, and hopefully a style or passion that shows that they are dedicated to their subject. This is pretty fundamental stuff. You’ll notice that I didn’t make reference to anything in that last statement that said they need to be ‘good’ at
their subject. We all know how subjective that statement is; what is vital is that they show a passion for their subject and (here’s the kicker) an interest that goes beyond anything that they have been asked to produce before at school.

I’ve spent hours looking at portfolios that show exactly the same work, all school or college projects, and all of them predictable and executed using the same techniques. This is because most A-level or BTEC courses up and down the country generally request the same or similar projects of their students. These students then tidy up these projects, pack them in their portfolios and take them to interviews to
present to a tutor who has seen 20 students already that day, all with the same work. And those tutors get bored. Really bored.

So how to break that boredom? It shouldn’t even require explanation, but it does because when you are young it is hard to see things from the point of view of the tutor. And after all, most of the advice you receive comes from your careers advisor who is generally telling you to take school work.

Creative subjects should be fun. They should be something you are passionate about, and that you work on outside of school or college hours regardless of what project your tutor has you working on. You should be scribbling in scrapbooks, taking photographs, building sites, working on Flash animations or making videos. Why would you not?

Most students I speak to, when quizzed persistently about their personal projects have plenty to show. If you’re lucky enough to find the right student, they will have plenty of good work to show. But they all look shocked when you suggest that they present it! In my experience it is assumed that you show school or college work only at interview.

The fear is of course that this work somehow has less value than a project your school or college has asked you to, because surely all that schooling has been leading up this moment? That’s undeniably so, but your admissions tutor will want to see a little bit of what makes you, you. What makes you tick? What are your personal interests creatively and how do you plan to explore those interests during the
course?

Take one case in point. Day 2 of interviews, 15:30. 12 students in, and so far we had seen mostly the same projects presented to us. Enter student ‘A’ who wants to show us his portfolio website of photographs. Photographs of manhole covers from across Europe. The are beautifully photographed, hand printed on bromide paper, and then scanned, annotated with fabulous typography and worked
into a slick slideshow with music, transitions and the option to buy prints. Bizarre? Certainly. But it was so accomplished the he stood out from the crowd, and got a large tick by his name. I won’t go so far as to say I bought a print, but I was impressed by the dedication and hard work that had brought this project together. He was working on this in his spare time.
No tutor was asking him to do this. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating the wholesale rejection of school or college work from these interviews – rather I’m encouraging students to consider that they will be one of many who will be presenting (more than likely) the same work over and over. I am also highlighting the huge importance of your personal interests and creative ambitions as these are ultimately what will fuel you through your course. Don’t undervalue these projects, no matter how unfinished they might be, or how insignificant you might consider them. They all show a dedication to work that is never evident in course work. Straight away this makes you a safer bet as a student as it shows that regardless of your education, you
are a creatively active person.

Being creative is something you are. It’s not something you just ‘do’.

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Interview with Upload Robots

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:02:30 +0000

At Scrunchup, we think it’s important to showcase young talent. This example is truly exceptional. A few weeks ago Nick and David, both aged 16, got in touch to tell us about an app they have developed called Upload Robots. We were initially apprehensive, but when we had a look, some jaws dropped and a few teacups fell out of hands, and we decided to interview them straight away for this issue.

What is Upload Robots? What does it do and when did you start it?

Nick: Upload Robots is a file sharing application. We feel that most of our competitors over run their site with advertisements, and have too many useless features. I started the initial plans for Upload Robots on the back of a math test in fifth grade. I had an initial prototype in 2006, which was visually horrible and without branding. David joined the team summer 2009.

What motivated you to set it up?

Nick: I created Upload Robots to transfer academic papers from my house to school, as I never seemed to have any printer ink. Upon checking analytics, I found that dozens of students as well as many teachers were also using the program. I guess the initial inspiration were the kids and teachers in my school who were relying on something I built to manage their important documents, but we wanted to build a file-management system more powerful than that.

David: When I joined Upload Robots and co-founded the site earlier this year, we were talking about a project to start for the summer and thought developing Nick’s earlier proof of concept for Upload Robots would be a great idea.

What’s your business model?

David: Our hosting and various other fixed costs are covered by the revenue generated by our premium membership and a sponsorship program. We insist on the lack of adverts on the file manager, and fortunately current free to premium conversion rates indicate that our business model is sustainable and scalable.

How did you find the whole business side of the project? Did you have anyone you could turn to for help?

Nick: We actually found the business aspects of the project to be pretty simple. The only management we had to provide was responding to contact forms. We sometimes receive a dozen per day, and we respond to every one. One benefit of being so small is that you never ran into any problems with bureaucracy. Our jobs were very clear: David designs, I develop. We rarely interfered with the other’s job. As Upload Robots grew, we have met some really cool people such as the wonderful Scrunchup team that have helped us by providing suggestions as well as assisting with marketing by featuring us on their site.

David: We’re not too good with P&Ls though.

What obstacles did you hit during development, and how did you overcome them?

David: The first obstacle was a simple one: finding enough time to complete the project. I currently work as an interactive designer at a non-profit and I know Nick works on various side projects almost constantly.

Nick: The hardest part of development was the uploading (big surprise). Instead of just using the solely the standard LAMP setup, I combined a few languages such as Perl and Python, using the best of each language to greatly increase performance.

Do you think your age has been a help or a hindrance to the development of the project?

David: Hush. Please don’t tell anyone, no one yet knows and we’d probably lose all of our customers if they did.

Nick: I think that it was both a hindrance and a benefit to the project. Being so young, VC backing was not an option as it’s too risky to invest in a couple highschoolers. We also have to constantly conceal our age because we are dealing with people’s important documents, and they might not trust us because people, including ourselves, are inherently ageist. One benefit is that by living in our parents house, we have virtually no living costs, so we could work full time on Upload Robots instead of having to get a side-job to sustain us.

What/Who are your inspirations?

David: I am really inspired by minimal, Swiss-styled design. Although classically minimalist site would not have been practical for Upload Robots, I still carried the philosophy of necessity & functionality over unnecessary adornment when creating the user-interface. This may sound trite, but the interactive designers at Apple have really been pioneers in user-interface design and I was certainly inspired by the revolutionary interface on the iPhone.

Nick: Although there aren’t too many famous programmers to look up to, I’m a fan of John Resig, the creator of jQuery.

Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

David: I will be at a university in the UK, studying classical history. I will of course be running Upload Robots and doing web design in my free time.

Nick: I’ll be at college studying computer science, hopefully running Upload Robots on the side.

What resources would you recommend to others wanting to create a cool app?

David: For aspiring app designers, learn HTML/CSS before going anywhere near Photoshop. Knowing how the web actually works is significantly more important and will save you time in the long run. A great resource for learning HTML and CSS is the ubiquitous W3Schools and the HTML validator. Design resources are everywhere, open your eyes.

Nick: Know what your application does. If you cannot explain exactly what your software does in five words, it is too complex. When you have a working prototype, write down features you want to build before you call it finished. Otherwise, you will keep adding features till it unusable.

What are your favorite quotes?

Nick: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. – Tom Cargill

David: Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work. – Thomas Edison

How did you start learning web design?

Nick: My father used to be a programmer, he taught me a bit of Visual Basic when I was 8. Since that point in time, I have spent hours a day learning about technology.

David: DM: A course in high school, no social life, and a love of logic, simplicity and beauty.

Do you have an idea of what your next big project is?

Nick: We are actually writing a book that is scheduled to be published this Summer. We still need to work on a title, but it will be something along the lines of ‘When Do I Start? The young entrepeneurs guide to staring a web business’. It will be roughly one hundred fifty pages in length.

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Interview with Zac Gordon

anna — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:02:06 +0000

What do you do and what does your job involve?

I teach full time at a high school in the states (Silver Spring, MD). This involves two web design courses (design and development) and two internships (the school site and work for paying clients). I also adjunct teach at a few local colleges and universities

What sorts of things do you teach to students on your courses?

I take a very web standards approach from the beginning: semantic markup, unobtrusive scripting, mvc programming. Since the classes range quite a bit we cover everything from HTML to WordPress theme development.

What makes a good web designer/developer?

A good eye, patience, ambition to improve one’s skills and widen one’s perspective. Some sick nasty Photoshop skills don’t hurt either ;) Oh, and networking. It can’t hurt to go to conferences or meetups and get to know folks out there in the industry.

Tell us a bit about “dabrook“

Ha! The high school I teach at is Springbrook, affectionately called “Da Brook.” So that’s the name. I use the site to pass information on to my students and any other folks interested in the content my courses cover. I’m all about creative commons licensing so go to town with dissemination!

Why do you teach and work at the same time?

Cause I’m crazy! I teach full time, part time, and run a web design business. Not a very sustaining practice. But I LOVE everything I’m doing and seem to very quickly fill up my time in different arenas regarding webucation and business. Working in the industry gives me a lot of experience interacting with clients and building different types of sites on different platforms and in different environment. So I bring that to the students. That’s tough stuff to learn in school. Teaching forces me to really know my stuff inside and out, on a technical level–reading lots of tutorials and the W3C specs, stuff like that.

What’s it like teaching web design in the States?

Webucation in the states is very promising. Connecting with WaSP and the Interact curriculum has given me a really good framework for talking to institutions, writing curriculum, etc. What’s happening now in the education system is what was happening a decade ago to the professional world in terms of advocating for web standards.

What’s your favourite part of the job?

My students!!!!! You all rock! Want to warm a teacher’s heart? Stay in touch… drop a line… something small really means a lot to teachers who put their heart and souls into their work.

Is there anything you would encourage other teachers in your field to do differently?

Yeah, email me! I’d love to be in touch with other webucators out there ;) It’s hard to say without knowing their specific situation.

What would you recommend to young people wanting to start a career in the web?

You gotta do what you gotta do. I am still taking classes for certification because of No Child Left Behind policies regarding the requirements of high school teachers, so I empathize with those out there in a similar situation. That said, I would never recommend taking a course if its outdated. You’re better off with a book and some time to focus and learn on your own.

What’s your favorite quote?

“My duty is to my heart” – Mulan (from Disney’s Mulan 2)