Why Data Visualization Matters: It's Funnel Optimization

Posted on February 26, 2013October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

One of the reasons I like to give presentations at conferences is because it forces me to really, really, really, crystallize my thoughts. When I’m writing a blog post, I’m generally just trying to get an idea into some sort of coherent form, but conference presentations, for me, have a much higher bar for clarity and concision.

Part of my presentation at the Austin DAA Symposium earlier this month focused on data visualization. It didn’t go very deep into the mechanics of effective data visualization, but I did try to make a strong case that the topic really matters.

Driving Action

As analysts, our ultimate goal is to drive action that delivers business value. Stop and consider what is involved in “driving action:”

A person who is empowered to act must make a decision to act.

So, really, what we’re talking about here is impacting a decision by a human being, and, if we consider that:

A decision is made based on thoughts and ideas in the brain.

That means that, as analysts, it behooves us to understand a little bit about how the brain works.

Neuroscience says…

Two guys who have had a strong professional influence on me are Stephen Few and John Medina:

Few’s Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data is, I’ve come to realize, poorly named. The three words before the colon are unduly limiting, as the principles in the book apply to the effective visual communication of any data, regardless of whether it is presented on a dashboard.
Medina’s book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, posits that, while there is much we do not yet understand about how the brain works, there absolutely are some things we do understand, and it behooves us to put that knowledge to use!

Both books provide descriptions of the different types of memory, and both provide various tips for getting information to long-term memory, which is where information needs to be in order for a person to decide to act (and then follow through on that decision).

Taking those concepts and morphing them a bit cheekily into the marketing vernacular of “the funnel,” we’re talking about memory looking like this:

The Memory Funnel

Ultimately, if we don’t get the key points of our analysis into long-term memory, then there is little hope of action being taken. Just as eCommerce sites have to optimize their purchase funnel, as analysts, we need to optimize the memory funnel when presenting results.

In the case of the memory funnel the steps are actually much more distinct than the awareness/consideration/preference/etc. steps in the marketing funnel. They’re distinct…but they have some unpleasant realities.:

Iconic memory — this is also called the “visual sensory register,” and it’s where “preattentive cognitive processing” occurs. We are constantly bombarded with information, and our iconic memory is the first point that we are aware — subconsciously aware — of every bit of information in our field of view. Instantaneously, we are making decisions as to what information we should actually pay attention. This means that, instantaneously, we are discarding most of what we see! If a chart is unclear, our iconic memory may very well shift focus to the clock on the wall or the ugly tie being worn by the fellow sitting next to the analyst. Iconic memory is fickle and fleeting!
Short-term memory — this is where we actually focus and “think about what we’re seeing.” It’s that thought that is going to decide whether or not the information gets passed along to long-term memory. But, here’s the real kicker when it comes to short-term memory: it can only hold 3 to 9 pieces of visual information at once. It’s our RAM…but it’s RAM circa 1992, in that it has very limited capacity. The more extraneous information we include in our analysis results, the more we risk a buffer overrun. And, if short-term memory can’t fully make sense of the information, then it’s going to fall out of the funnel then and there.

“Sight” is the sense that we are forced to heavily rely on to communicate the results of our analyses. There is a lot of visual clutter occurring in our audiences’ worlds that we can’t control, and we’re competing with that visual clutter any time we deliver the results of our work. It behooves us to compete as effectively as we possibly can by effectively visualizing the information we are communicating.

General

10 Presentation Tips No. 8: We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

Posted on January 12, 2012October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

This is the eighth post in a 10-post series on tips for effective presentations. For an explanation as to why I’m adding this series to a data-oriented blog, see the intro to the first post in the series. To view other tips in the series, click here.

Tip No. 8: We Have Five Senses. Use TWO!

One of the most interesting books I’ve read over the past few years is Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina. In easy-to-read prose, with lots of interesting examples, Medina lays out 12 “rules” of how the brain works — acknowledging up front that there is an infinite number of things we don’t yet understand about the brain, but that there actually are a number of things that we absolutely do know. The book focuses on the latter (for a slightly deeper read on my take on the book, jump over to this blog post from a couple of years ago).

Many of these the presentation tips in this series can be tied directly back to Medina’s brain rules, but this post is focused on three specific ones:

Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses

Now, obviously, when it comes to presentations, you typically only have two senses to work with: sight and sound.

From Medina’s book:

We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.

What neuroscientists have figured out is that, by routing the same information through multiple senses, you have a better chance of making the information “stick.”

In a typical presentation environment, the senses of smell, taste, and touch are largely off the table, so you’re working with two senses. The good news is that sight is far and away the most dominant sense, but, “We learn and remember best through pictures, not written words.” (see Tip No. 3)

Here’s where presenters, even ones who intuitively know they need to be leveraging both sight and sound, often go awry. They approach their presentation with this mindset:

Sight = “what’s on my slides”
Hearing = “what I say”

This is a formula for under-utilizing these senses. In addition to the above, there are a number of other ways to play off these senses:

“Hearing” is not just what you say, but how you say it — changes in volume and tempo are a second layer of “hearing”; avoid the monotone (and know that, even when you feel like you are dramatically changing your pitch and tone…it’s probably not coming across as nearly that dramatic. This is one of the reasons it makes sense to video some of your rehearsals).
“Sight” is not just the content on your slides, it’s the sight of you — your facial expressions and movement. Can you think of a presentation you’ve seen where the presenter literally seemed to bounce around the stage and or gesture dramatically with his/her hands? Chances are, you can. Now, can you remember what the presenter was talking about? Again, you probably can. This actually dips into Medina’s Rule #4 (we don’t pay attention to boring things), but my point here is that your audience is looking at you as much as they are looking at your slides. So, you need to be cognizant of that and use “the sight of you” to reinforce your content and make it more memorable.

Two examples where this tip has been creatively applied to great effect:

At eMetrics in Washington, D.C., in 2010, Ensighten launched a campaign by starting a “tag revolution” — a “tagolution” — that included the distribution of colonial wigs to all of the conference attendees. When Josh Manion got on stage to talk about Ensighten for 5 minutes, he delivered the presentation with one such wig on his own head. I don’t remember any other vendor that presented in that session. And, because the wig wasn’t simply a “be goofy” gag — because it actually tied directly to the point Josh was trying to convey — his presentation “stuck.” In essence, Ensighten actually leveraged a third sense — touch — by distributing wigs to the conference attendees. I got to plop a wig on my head (in the privacy of my hotel room!), so the point really, really, really “stuck.”
As another example, I teach an internal class at Resource Interactive that is focused on how to go about establishing clear objectives and KPIs up front in any engagement. The material was co-developed with Matt Coen, and one of the points he introduced was the classic play on “Ready, Aim, Fire,” and how digital marketers have this ugly tendency to instead go with “Ready (‘I need to do social media!’),” “Fire (‘I’m throwing up a Facebook page!’)”, “Aim (‘Did the Facebook page deliver results?’).” As we worked through the content, I found an image of someone firing a gun, and then introduced a simple build of three words on top of the image: “Ready” then “Fire” then “Aim.” Simple enough. I had imagery, it was a valid analogy to the point we were discussing, and the slide only had 3 big words on it. Then, I had the idea to introduce a sound effect — right as the word “Fire” appeared, a gunshot sound effect went off. Without fail, everyone in the class jumps, then sits up straight, then chuckles. It works.

I’m not saying that you should always include props in your presentations, nor that you should drop gratuitous sound effects throughout your deck. But, if you consciously think, “How can I maximize the impact of the senses of sight and sound,” you have a better shot at making your presentation — and its content — more memorable.

Photo by gabriel amadeus

General

Four Books That Will Change the Way You Communicate

Posted on December 22, 2009October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

I don’t think I will ever forget the first time that I made a presentation at work. It was just over a decade ago, I was just a few months into my employment at a company where I would work for the next eight years, and I was on the hook to present a new process to a room of 20 engineers. I diligently prepared my transparencies (I’m old enough to have used an overhead projector, but not old enough to refer to the medium they supported as “foils”). I rehearsed the material again and again.

And I bombed.

The material was dry as it was, but it wasn’t, by any means, unmanageable content. I just didn’t do a good job of managing it!

Fast forward 10 years, and I found myself giving a presentation to a room of 50-60 people, and the material was set up to be just as naturally engaging — presenting on an approach to measurement and analytics to…a bunch of marketers.

The presentation went much better, judging both from the engagement level of the audience and discussions that it has prompted weeks later. I’m no Steve Jobs, but I’ve paid attention to what seems to work and what doesn’t (both in my presentations and others), read some articles here and there, and, I realized, read a few books along the way that have really helped.

So, with that — four books that all have a heavy component of “how the brain works” and that, collectively, have taught me a lot about how to present information, be it a dashboard, a report, or a presentation.

Gladwell and Gilbert

The first two books are books that I read within a few months of each other. To this day, I recall specific anecdotes with no idea which book they came from. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking made the rounds when it first came out as “another great book by Malcolm Gladwell” (following The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference). The fundamental anecdote of Blink has to do with our “adaptive unconscious” — our intuition and ability to “know” things without fully needing to process them. As he dives into example after example, Gladwell touched on various aspects of how the brain works.

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness takes a more directly psychological angle, but it covers some of the same territory. One of Gilbert’s main points is that the human brain does not remember things like we think it does — pointing out that a vividly remembered, down-to-the-color-of-the-shirt-you-were-wearing memory is not really an as-recorded memory at all. Rather, the brain remembers a few specific details and then makes up / fills in the rest when the memory gets called up. It’s so good at filling in these blanks that it fools itself into not being able to tell fact from interpolation!

Both of these books made an impact on me, because they pointed out that how we take in, process, and store information doesn’t work at all like we intuitively think it does. And, both books set up the next two books by shaking the assumptional foundations I had of how we, as humans, think.

Straight-Up Business Reading

Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a practical manual for communicating information that you want your audience to pay attention to and retain. They boil the components into a five-letter acronym — S.U.C.C.E.S. — and go into each component in detail.

The elements are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories, and they provide a nice framework for critiquing how we communicate any idea. Irecognize that I regularly struggle with Simple, Concrete, and Stories as elements in my blog posts. But, every element is one that can be injected using some discipline and time to do so. I nailed all three of these elements a number of years ago when I found myself on an internal lecture circuit trying to drum up large donors for my company’s annual United Way campaign — I was heavily vested in conveying a strong message, and I wound up using an example of my grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s as a way to pull the audience in and ask them to find something they were passionate about and support it. I also wove in various quirky takes on how $10/week would really add up — think the sort of thing you hear again and again from your local NPR station during fundraising drives. In the case of that campaign, we blew our numbers out of the water — had a 500% increase in the number of people who gave at the “leadership level” that year. Now, a lot of things had to come together to make that happen, but, to this day, I’m sure my well-crafted, well-rehearsed, and sincere speech made to at least a dozen different groups of employees (and the fact that I was a fairly low-level employee making the case — I was asking people who were making a lot more money than I was to give at least as much as I was), played a non-trivial role.

And that was years before I read Made to Stick. But, the book helped me reflect on any number of presentations — ones that worked and ones that didn’t.

And, Finally, Wisdom from a Neuroscientist

The last book in this tetralogy is one that I just finished reading — Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, by John Medina. I stumbled across the book as a recommendation from Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, so I wasn’t surprised that it had some very practical tips, as well as the “why?” behind them, for communicating effectively. Medina’s premise is that there’s a ton of stuff we don’t yet understand about the brain. BUT, there are also a lot of things we do know about the brain, and many of those lay out pretty clearly that the way we work in business and the way our education system is set up both run counter to how the brain naturally functions.

These “things we do know” are broken down into 12 “rules” — exercise (good for the brain), survival (why and how the brain evolved…and implications), wiring (how the brain works at a highly micro level), attention (there’s NO SUCH THING as multitasking…and other goodies), short-term memory (what makes it there and how), long-term memory (what makes it there, how, and how long it takes to get there), sleep (good for the brain), stress (some kinds are good, some kinds are bad), sensory integration (the more senses involved, the better the memory), vision (the #1 sense), gender (men are from Mars…), exploration (age doesn’t really degrade our ability to learn). Medina ends each chapter (one rule per chapter) with “Ideas” — implications for the real world based on the information presented.

The book goes into very technical detail about how, when, and where electrical charges zip around in our skulls to accomplish different tasks. While that information is not directly applicable, each time he goes there it’s as a setup to more directly useful information. Throughout the book, Medina provides practical thoughts for how to communicate more effectively — helping people pay attention (getting the information you are communicating into working memory) and retain the information over both the short and the long term. Two of my absolute favorite nuggets from the book were:

p. 130 (in the chapter on long-term memory) — Medina has the reader do a little memory exercise with the following characters: “3 $ 8 ? A % 9.” The fact he drops after the exercise is interesting: “The human brain can hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! If something does not happen in that short stretch of time, the information becomes lost.” This is about getting information on its way from working memory to long-term memory and how repetition, thinking about the information, and talking about the information all helps it on its way. As a communicator (be it through a presentation or through a dashboard of data), this seems like powerful stuff — how often have we all seen someone cut loose with slide after slide of mind-numbing information? The human brain simply cannot take all of that in and retain it without some help!
p. 239 (in the chapter on vision) — Medina has a section titled “Toss your PowerPoint presentations.” I groaned. While I get highly annoyed by the rampant misuse of PowerPoint, I’m not a Tufte acolyte to the point that I see the tool itself as evil. In the second paragraph, though, Medina clarifies by providing a two-step prescription: 1) burn your current presentations, and 2) make new ones. Medina’s beef with PowerPoint is that the default slide template is text-based with a six-level hierarchy. This entire chapter is about how a picture really is worth 1,000 words, and Medina pleads with the reader to cut wayyy back on the text in his/her presentations (he has a fascinating explanation of how, when we read, we’re really interpreting each letter as a small picture…and that’s actually not a good thing for retention of information).

There are oodles of other good information in the book, but these are two of the snippets that really resonated with me.

Better to Be Steve Jobs than Bill Gates

I do believe that some people have better communication instincts than others. I’ll never be Steve Jobs when it comes to holding an auditorium in the palm of my hand. But, between reading these books and thinking through my own evolution as a communicator (this blog notwithstanding…but I’ve always said that I write this blog to keep my e-mails shorter and to try out ideas that occur to me during the day — sorry folks…both of you…but this blog is mostly for me!), I’m convinced that effective communication is a trainable skill.

I’ve also noticed that, the more I have to communicate, and the more I work to do so effectively, the easier it seems to be getting. In another 20 years, I might just have it nailed!

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