Archive for the ‘Presenting Research’ Category

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Two Examples of Animated Data Visualization

Thursday, May 30th, 2013

As market researchers pay more and more attention to the need for compelling data visualizations, Hans Rosling’s work with interactive data is becoming a catalyst for a fascinating new type of data visualization: animated statistical graphs.  He uses them to show world social and economic trends over time, and the effect is exceptionally powerful.  Here is a video of his TED talk well worth watching, in which the first eleven minutes are focused on interactive graphs:

 

Others are following his lead, though not always to the same superb effect.  Here is another animated statistical graph, this one documenting drone strikes and fatalities in Pakistan: (more…)

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Telling Clients What They Want to Hear

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

It’s our job to deliver bad news as well as good news, right?  To tell clients what they’re doing wrong so they can fix their problems and leap to the next level of profitability, right?  Why would they spend money collecting data if they just wanted to hear how much customers love them?  In fact, why would they want to hear how much customers love them, if the research says otherwise?

A recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests some answers that may surprise you.  (more…)

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Tell Me What I’m Doing Wrong

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

This is my dog Lancelot on his first day at his new home

If you have ever done “clicker training” with a dog, you know how amazingly effective positive rewards are in training, versus the old-fashioned method of “correction” and negative feedback.  Identify and reward the behavior you want, and you can teach an old dog new tricks within hours.  It works for people too, which is why so many HR and business experts talk about the power of praise in teaching and motivating employees.  I can relate to this.  I love my work most when our clients offer generous praise and tell us that we exceeded their expectations.

But I also worry:  Is the work really good?  Is it as good as it can be?  Is it finding its way up to other managers and decision makers, and is it helping them, too?  Maybe this reflects professional insecurity, but new research published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows it is common as people gain expertise in their fields.  Quoting the study published a few months ago: (more…)

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Designing Excellent Charts: Show and Don’t Tell

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “How to Design an Excellent Chart.” It addresses one critical piece of turning research data into compelling stories by focusing on the process of data visualization.  For us, that process involves five steps:

(more…)

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Snowing the Boss with Data

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny.  Maybe I’m just not cynical enough (ha!  my friends are laughing already!)  But I can’t think of any managers or clients for whom I’ve worked that are like the pointy-haired boss in this episode.  I have never been asked to provide tons of data that look so boring it will be ignored.  On the contrary, most for whom I have worked worry about getting mountains of meaningless data because too often that is what research suppliers deliver.

What do managers and clients want—even those who are less-than-enthusiastic about market research because it has too often failed them in the past?  Here’s my experience of what they want: (more…)

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Avoiding Phony Precision in Your Press Release

Friday, May 18th, 2012

I recently saw a press release about a study showing that only 19.5% of news release headlines are optimized for SEO.  It brought to mind all kinds of issues about how best to report numbers in press releases.  In particular it highlighted the important issue of whether specific numbers are meaningful  and whether they communicate a misleading sense of precision.

For example, when a survey reports a margin of error to any decimal place, it suggests a level of precision that is misleading.  Do a quick search, and you’ll find press releases reporting margins of sampling error such as +/- 4.8%, +/- 10.5%, or +/- 1.85%.  These numbers are based on sample size formulas that assume perfect random sampling and one hundred percent response rates, which are almost never achieved. (more…)

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How to Make a Beautiful Market Share Chart

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time?  In R.  That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis.  It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of an intensive course of training and retraining in R.  Here is just one beautiful example of what R can do. (more…)

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What Statisticians Really Do

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

We came across these images in a series of humorous montages that professionals had created about what they do.  This one was created by Jason Sullivan:

(more…)

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Bad Charts and Good Charts for Kony 2012

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

We came across this chart from Invisible Children, the group that produced the Kony 2012 video.  It shows the organization’s expenditures by category.  It is a poorly designed chart for three reasons:

1.  The pieces of the doughnut are not correctly proportional.  For some reason, the arc widths were compressed for some categories (like Media & Film Creation) distorting the true size of the relationships among categories.

2.  Information is squeezed onto the chart in such a way that some of it is unreadable.  Even if you click on the chart to get a full-sized image, it is difficult to discern the numbers for the Media & Film Creation category.

3.  Percentages are shown to two decimal places, which is unimportant.  Why add extra numbers if they don’t convey extra information?

A better way to create the chart is shown below.  It is less snazzy.  But it shows the important data (the relative sizes of each expense category) accurately.

Even so, this chart is probably not the best choice, either.  Pie charts are excellent for showing relative proportions of the whole, but once you have more than four our five slices, it is usually too much information for this type of chart, and your brain does not really process those relative proportions. (more…)

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Your Customers DO Care about the Numbers

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Coincidentally in the same week that Versta Research published its winter newsletter on Turning Data into Stories: A How-To Guide, last week’s AMA event in Chicago was a market research panel focused on telling stories with data.  The presentations were solid, with lots of helpful ideas.  But there was also a misguided idea working its way through the room, worthy of spirited debate, if only we had more time.  It is the idea, as one panelist put it, that “clients don’t care about numbers.” (more…)

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