In February 2006, Swedish physician, statistician, and global health expert Hans Rosling brought down the house at TED (the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference in Monterey, CA) with a presentation on health and economic trends in developing nations. But it wasn’t the content of the presentation so much as the software he was using that grabbed the audience: called Trendalyzer, the program converted Rosling’s data into colorful animated graphs. By representing countries as dots of varying size that moved against the x and y axes over time, Trendalyzer brought vivid life to changes such as the last century’s general improvements in income and life expectancy—and highlighted how health and wealth in once-lagging regions such as Asia have surged ahead, while they have improved much more slowly in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.
To many in the audience (and to me, when I watched the online video of Rosling’s TED talk), the Trendalyzer presentation was a revelation, seemingly heralding a new era in which clever design choices coupled with serious graphics-processing power would cause all sorts of interesting trends in complex data to leap out at computer users. Indeed, the next year, Google announced that it had acquired the Trendalyzer software from Rosling’s non-profit Gapminder Foundation, saying that it hoped to improve and expand Trendalyzer and make it “freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.” Unfortunately, like many other early-stage technologies that get anointed by the massive buzz amplifier that is TED, Trendalyzer has since receded from view. Google hasn’t done much with the software, beyond making a Trendalyzer-like gadget called “MotionChart” available as part of Google Spreadsheets.
Meanwhile, there’s a company in Newton, MA, that has spent the better part of this decade quietly applying many of the same design principles behind Trendalyzer to business problems—and selling its software, to boot. It’s called Visual I|O, and I spent some time recently learning about the company’s remarkably beautiful Web-based business analytics software, called DecisionIris, from company co-founder, president, and CEO Angela Shen-Hsieh.
Now, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever used “beautiful” and “business analytics software” in the same sentence. While Visual I|O markets DecisionIris as a business intelligence tool, and making sense of complex business data is certainly one of its strengths, it would be grossly unfair to lump the program in with the kinds of graphical tools offered by traditional business intelligence companies like SAP and Cognos, which are closer to the primitive chart wizards in Microsoft Excel than to anything a professional information designer might conceive. If you’re an aficionado of the work of Yale information designer Edward Tufte—author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations and the man the New York Times has described as “the da Vinci of data”—then you will immediately feel at home with the way DecisionIris represents logical relationships and changes over time, and with the innate sense of color and proportion built into the software.
I’m gushing, I know, but bear with me. The program’s beauty is undoubtedly traceable to the fact that Shen-Hsieh and her fellow co-founder Mark Schindler are both Harvard-trained architects, not software engineers. The pair created Visual I|O as a spinoff of Chicago-based consulting firm Schindler + Associates (where Mark was a partner) in 2002; they wanted to take the visualization software the firm had created to help clients such as pharmaceutical companies get a high-level view of their data and turn it into a commercial product.
Shen-Hsieh (pronounced “shen-shay”) and Schindler felt sure that there was a larger market for software that would help business managers visualize data more flexibly—switching between space-based and time-based representations, for example—depending on the kinds of insights being sought. After all, why go the trouble of collecting terabytes of data about a company’s performance and assembling it into huge, expensive databases and data warehouses if you can’t play with it at will? “If you look at the history of information technology, so much of it is focused on storing and accessing data,” Shen-Hsieh says. “We focus in the last 18 inches–from the screen to the brain. We’re about the cognitive piece.”
Since a picture equals one kiloword, I’ll refer you at this point to the picture at right. It’s a screen shot from a demo Shen-Hsieh walked me through, based on real data about residential properties for sale in the Boston suburbs of Brookline, Newton, Waltham, and Watertown. It illustrates how DecisionIris can help users draw meaning from a mess of data by bringing out multiple dimensions of the data simultaneously; an example about real estate seems easier for most people to relate to than heavy business analytics. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)
Each dot in the chart represents a house. The size of the dot represents the house’s asking price, and its color shows which town it’s in—Brookline is purple, Newton is blue, Waltham is green, and Watertown is yellow. The horizontal axis indicates the year the house was built, and the vertical axis indicates its square footage. (Notice how that’s already four dimensions of data, packed into a type of graph usually used for no more than two dimensions.)
What observations can be drawn from the chart? Well, right away, it’s obvious that houses for sale in Newton are older, bigger, and more expensive than houses in the other cities. That makes sense, given that Newton (where Visual I|O happens to be located) was one of Boston’s first major suburbs, and is still home to
