The Purist and their Ivory Towers

Author: Thomas Gonzalez

There is a school of thought in the world of data visualization that I like to refer to as the "purist" approach. This outlook and view has been adopted by a few prominent individuals who specialize in data visualization, most of who are simply re-hashing or misinterpreting the work of Edward Tufte. The reason why I felt the need to comment on this phenomena, is that these practitioners speak with such an air of authority and arrogance that a neophyte reading their material would come away with a very skewed perspective on how to apply data visualization best practices in a pragmatic manner, specifically when it comes to designing effective business performance dashboards..

To help understand how to recognize this school of thought I have listed some of the more salient characteristics that can be seen over and over again when reading their materials.

  1. The purist spends 80% of their time pointing out what is wrong in others work through diligent critiques while only showing brief examples of what they propose to be more optimized solutions.
  2. The purist has a strong disdain for any aesthetic “decoration” or consideration within a dashboard design.
  3. The purist favors “efficient’ but more obscure visualization metaphors that leave the typical information consumer confused.
  4. The purist usually ignores the interactivity of the medium and usually reserve their critiques to static 2d analysis, as if the computer monitor where a piece of paper versus a device that the user can interact with (via the keyboard, mouse, etc..)
  5. The purist is usually not a technologist, and as such offers advice that is more suited to float in the rarified air of academia than being grounded in the pragmatism of one who actually uses technology on a daily basis to accomplish business objectives.


Let’s take a closer look at some of these characteristics and how they truly undermine the purported goal of improving the practice of data visualization

Critique before Praise: I will give them this: the purist, if nothing else, is passionate. Unfortunately this passion seems to take the form of an almost evangelistic criticism of most software vendors and their dashboard visualization tools. In my experience when writing articles that are aimed at teaching best practices in data visualization, one of the easiest things to do is to point out bad examples of other peoples work. Unfortunately this approach does little to help readers quickly master the basics of good design; instead they are left with a catalogue of what not to do and no information on what should be done. The irony of this approach is that contrary to the visual “efficiency” the purist is trying to advocate, their literary approach is extremely inefficient as the big take away the reader has is all of the things that should NOT be done.

Aesthetics have no place in Data Visualization: While it is true that “sex sells”, and most dashboard vendors spend a lot of time drawing attention to their hyper realistic gauges and dials, it is not true that these “decorations” are ineffective. When properly used, aesthetics can play a huge rule in the effectiveness of a dashboard. Studies have shown that aesthetics play an important role in the perception, and ease of use. Dashboards have a unique set of requirements from a business and data visualization perspective, some of these requirements are quite a bit different from the requirements of doing data exploration or data analysis across large volumes of data. If a dashboard is being built to help monitor certain measures or operations that support a key business strategy or objective, I would think doing everything in your power to encourage end users to use and look at these measures would be a positive thing. The aesthetic appeal of the dashboard and the resulting emotional reaction to the visualization plays a large role in how easy users find the tool to use and how receptive they are in wanting to look deeper at what is being displayed. Using interactive and eye-catching features like realistic gauges, specular highlighting, and other visual cues helps to engage the end user and can also be used to emphasize the more important information within a dashboard. In some of my presentations and writing I talk about creating a visual hierarchy to your dashboard designs. This hierarchy is designed to reinforce the level of importance of each KPI or measure so that it reflects the importance of the business decisions that are being made from the particular metrics. Using these more engaging visualizations and contrasting with more subtle and flatter visualizations can be an ideal way to reinforce this visual hierarchy.

Efficient but Obscure: One thing I am struck with immediately when looking at some of the more esoteric visualization approaches advocated by some of the purists is that the meaning of the data being showed is not immediately obvious. While many of these visualizations are extremely ingenious and very efficient in terms how much information that can be imparted in a small amount of space, the problem is that the user ends up struggling to understand what is being shown. The user ends up spending a significant amount of attention reading through explanations, digesting the visual relationships, and learning the new graphical metaphor. Once the visual representation is understood and assimilated through repeated use we can began to let our natural pattern recognition processes within our brains help us to quickly digest the data. But this misses the point, that the goal is not to teach end users some new and novel way to visualize information, but rely upon the current mechanisms they are used to in terms of visualizing data that allow for that “instant recognition” when seeing data. When a user is forced to invest intellectual thought into digesting the meaning of the spatial and visual representation of the data – they are no longer leveraging their powerful and native pattern recognition capabilities. Not that these novel approaches to visualization don’t have their place in data analysis, they just don’t belong on a business dashboard. The trick to doing great dashboard visualization work is to capitalize upon the visualizations and metaphors that users are accustomed to (and thus recognize naturally) to impart important business information that allows the user to make more efficient and timely decisions.

Escaping Flatland:

"We envision information in order to reason about, communicate, document, and preserve that knowledge -- activities nearly always carried out on two-dimensional paper and computer screen. Escaping this flatland and enriching the density of data displays are the essential tasks of information design."
- Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information.

Tufte serves as the canonical figure most often quoted or referenced by the purists, and the sad irony is that the purists seem to miss some of his most fundamental points. This is no more obvious than in the critiques that show a screen shot of a particular vendor’s dashboard tool that is then dissected as if it were a static object. Very little (if any) analysis is given to the more dynamic and interactive features of these dashboards. When an designer capitalizes upon the more dynamic nature of the vendors toolset and is able to effectively leverage the technology to selectively drill, filter, magnify, and highlight relevant data, these screens come to life and provide a very rich and dynamic interface for the user to immerse themselves more cognitively with the information at hand.

The Ivory Tower: In the real world we have users that don’t have the time to understand new and novel ways of visualizing data, customers who are impressed by the “sex and sizzle” and make purchase decisions accordingly, software tools that cant do everything perfectly, data that doesn’t meet clean and pre-defined notions. Real world solution providers have experience creating businesses and successful solutions while dealing with all of these variables and more. The purists on the other hand climb up into their Ivory Towers (usually a self-promoting column they have secured in one of the plethora of industry trade publications) and pontificate upon the finer points of data visualization expecting business users to change the way they think to meet their strict views on how to best present information. If the purist truly wants to change the way business people perceive data, they would develop a product that does that, market it, sell it, and implement it. Or at the very minimum, provide pragmatic and real world examples of how to do that with common software found in today’s market place. But then again that might actually force the purist to climb down from their tower and get their hands dirty in the work of solving real world problems with real world technology.