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PolicyViz Podcast Episode #11: Mico Yuk
154 Plays10 years ago
In this week’s episode, I speak with author, speaker, and dashboard expert Mico Yuk. Mico is co-founder and partner at BI Brainz, author of the book Data Visualization for Dummies, and leads business intelligence dashboard trainings around the world. In this...
The post PolicyViz Podcast Episode #11: Mico Yuk appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction of Mikko Yuck
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to the PolicyViz Podcast. I am your host, John Schwabusch. Welcome to the show. I'm very excited for my guest today, Mikko Yuck from BI Brains. Mikko, welcome to the show.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you, John. I am super excited. Yeah, thanks for coming on. You are sort of a little bit of a departure from my previous guest, because most of my previous guests and I, we've actually hugged and we're all really good friends. And you and I have just been emailing and tweeting each other for the last month. So I'm very excited to have you on the show. We've got lots of great stuff to talk about. So let's just get right to it. So for those of you who don't know Miko, you probably should.
00:00:50
Speaker
She is probably a top-notch keynoter on dashboard design all over the world. You've spoken at what, over 30 countries in the last few years? And counting. And counting. Well, that's good. That's good to be counting. She published a data visualization for Dummy's book last year. Her firm BI Brains, as she co-founded and is currently partner, is a top business intelligence dashboard firm and dashboard training firm.
00:01:16
Speaker
All lots of great stuff. So I want to jump right into it. Let's
Focus of 'Data Visualization for Dummies'
00:01:20
Speaker
first talk about the book, Data Visualization for Dummies. So obviously there's lots of books about data visualization. Tell me about the sort of overarching message that you have in this book. So it's interesting. Well, first of all, John, I'll hug you. Oh, OK. So I'm coming to Atlanta. Yeah, I'll hug you. I just want to get that clear. So database for dummies, and I call it database, essentially
00:01:46
Speaker
It was interesting because Wiley came to me to write the book and I think they were a little bit shocked because my overall message, which we had a little bit of a debate about, was the fact that people are too hooked on pretty charts and they're not focused enough on what is actually going in to the charts. So the overlying theme of the book versus being, and I told them, I said, look, if I got to build another book about what pretty charts to use, I'm not doing it. I said, if you want a book about what to put in the charts, I'm happy to do that. So believe it or not, the book is focused more around
00:02:16
Speaker
a method of determining what to measure versus how it will look. Right. So yeah, so it's not about the pop and making something pop, making something pretty. It's about what the content is and what's going into it. Absolutely. I mean, you know, there's, there's already enough school of thoughts around what to put in, right? We have heat chart and rough heat chart in Germany. We have Steven few, we have Edward Tufti. I mean, there's a lot of school of thoughts around the world on that. And I think there's too little focus on what
00:02:45
Speaker
You should be measuring. And is the book focus on, do you make a distinction between data visualization for internal use? So we're going to talk about your dashboard working a little bit, but do you talk about, is it, is there a distinction? Do you make a distinction between data vis for internal use versus external publications?
00:03:01
Speaker
No, being with Wiley and it being Dummies, it's literally built for the lowest denominator. And that's no offensive people have read it. It's not built for dumb people, but they really dumb it down. I wish it could have. We talked about that, but it was thrown out. Wow. Interesting. And so do you have a philosophy on an approach to creating an effective visualization?
Dashboard Design Methodology
00:03:20
Speaker
Absolutely. That's what we teach in our academy. But if you want me to kind of high level it, you have a very simple approach. So one of the things that we do and is we focus first on the message. And I am trying to avoid the three letter word KPI.
00:03:36
Speaker
I'm trying not to say it, KPIM metrics, but we focus on the what to measure first and the messaging and the story. So we have a way that we build our dashboard city where we focus on telling a four part story. The first part is focused on the current state and answering the question of where are you today?
00:03:53
Speaker
The second part is focused on the trends and looking at how did you get here. The third part is focused on the forecast, which explains where you're going to end up. And the fourth part is focused on the what if, which will explain where, you know, what do you need to change to hit your goals? So we literally take those four questions and we answer them and then we storyboard it out. And that's, and then the last thing we do is pick pretty charts. Nice.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yes. And is it tool? So unfortunately, I have not yet had a chance to read the whole book. It's sitting on my desk in the... Tool agnostic. Tool agnostic. Okay. All right. Good. Absolutely. Now, so, okay. So let's move into dashboards because we're going to bring in the data that is, I think, into the dashboard design. So maybe let's start. Let me ask you to just start. Maybe you could describe what BI Brains does, what your philosophy is there, and what your approach is to creating really good dashboards.
Origins of BI Brains
00:04:47
Speaker
So our BI Brains came about as a result of a community that we started around a tool called Excelsius, which was one of my business objects, which SAP now owns. Um, I started the blog on my 25th birthday. I remember it because I wanted to find other people that are like myself. It was back in the days when blog, when a blogger was a good place to blog, if that helps you a little bit way back. And essentially the philosophy of BI Brains is when we put the call out there around, hello, they'd be like dashboards.
00:05:14
Speaker
A lot of executives are big companies, answer.com. And I was very shocking. And we kept hearing the same thing, which was, I have this fantastic IT department and unfortunately all I'm getting is data and rows. I need something quick. I need something fast. And this was before the iPhone days. So the philosophy around BI brains is that we create experiences from data that people enjoy and love. It's about the experience for us.
00:05:39
Speaker
And so when I talk to clients and they show me
00:05:45
Speaker
a table. And they say, this is what our manager likes. It's a table. It's 90 columns by 90 rows. And every week we provide this 20 pages of tables. And our managers, we know it's terrible. And our managers like to go to this cell. And I always say, well, what about this other cell that they're not paying attention to? Maybe that's a big deal. Those are stories that you sort of hear. And if you do, how do you get people to change that behavior and change that method?
From Data Tables to Storytelling
00:06:11
Speaker
So one thing that we find is change, the word change by itself is a four-letter word in most organizations. So the first thing that we do is we never say the word change. That's the first thing that physically people just shut down when you tell them to change. Okay. So what we tend to focus on is when we see these types of silos or one we think in, we tend to try to focus on taking people through the exercises of let's start to build some pictures.
00:06:37
Speaker
and let's see if you can understand what we're saying, okay? Because a lot of what we find is the reason why people don't draw, John, is they're just afraid that their drawings are too ugly. I mean, there's an intimidation that, oh gosh, if I put out my chicken scratch, everybody's going to go running for the hills, and they don't understand that. Think about it, John. You have kids. You have beautiful kids. I assume your daughter has made something that
00:07:02
Speaker
Aesthetically, it may not have been the best, but there was a stick figure of mommy and daddy. Daddy was way too short. Mommy was way too tall. Her head's big. Your head's small. With two kids on the bottom, unrecognizable, and you probably adore it and have it on your frame.
00:07:17
Speaker
They are pretty good. I won't lie to you. They're pretty good guys. Exactly. And in your eyes, they're amazing because it's not the fact that it's not straight, it's not colored. You understand the sentiment and you understand what you're trying to communicate. That's the way people have to think about pictures. You have to think about grade school and go back to the fact of focusing on a message versus how pretty it is. Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
Actually, right now she's making data visualizations for me. So I now wake up with bar charts. I love it. It's pretty nice. It's a good day. So when you are asking, encouraging people to think about stories, telling stories with dashboards, is that a different
00:08:00
Speaker
Is that a different skill set or is it a different approach than if you are creating a one-off graph or creating an infographic or is it also just the same about telling stories?
00:08:09
Speaker
No, absolutely. When you're creating, especially when you're creating something, a dashboard typically separates itself from a data discovery tool in the fact that you're creating something that kind of stays. It's not necessarily static, but it's something that you're using to look at again and again. Now, one big pitfall that we see with dashboards for those people who are doing it, and you need to listen to this because I said it and it went viral. The biggest problem with dashboards when people do figure out how to create them is they can't get beyond the trend.
00:08:39
Speaker
They go into this loop of only doing monitoring and they never actually add action to the data. Okay. So I know I jumped ahead a little bit, but I want to jump in there because I know you have a sophisticated audience. And so one of the biggest things, once people figure out, Oh, I got to put a couple of charts on the screen and tell this story. Let's say they use my four part story. The next problem is all they do is show a bunch of data that showed me.
00:09:02
Speaker
how I got here, but it doesn't show me what I'm going to do next. So one of our biggest pushes is to ask people to get beyond the trend. And that goes back to what you were saying, what's wrong with those 19 to 20 page reports? Well, guess what? I'm looking at a number that tells me how I got here. Where's the information that's going to tell me what I need to do to fix my problems?
00:09:23
Speaker
That's where the world is headed. And what's the balance between four dashboards specifically? What's the balance between the detailed sort of table approach with lots of numbers that I can dig into and the visualizations? Do you have sort of a philosophy on the balance?
Importance of Concise Dashboards
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah. It's not a philosophy. It's very quick. That rich human attention span is what, five to eight seconds? With your kids and your generation, they're going to be about two to three seconds. I tell people two to three clicks and it's over.
00:09:53
Speaker
The drill to China has officially ended when iPad started, okay? And so I tell people, I limited the clicks right now. It's two to three clicks to get the answer. And that's a lot, by the way. But in the world we're in with these, all these tools, two to three clicks, otherwise you're in dinosaur age. Yeah. Think about it, John. Let me ask you a question. When's the last time you went on Google? A few minutes ago. Okay. Did you get the page too?
00:10:18
Speaker
No. Of course I didn't get to page two. Why? If I didn't get what I needed on page one, I'm not going to page two. So what do you do? Don't you go back and re-query? Don't speak an assumption that your query was wrong. That's right. Okay. Welcome to dashboard and world. Nobody's going to go down eight clicks looking for what, you know what they do? They go either this tool, either they refurbish and they go backward to see, hmm, I clicked the wrong thing, or they simply go look at something else.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. And so what happens when, let's go back to my analyst story. So my analyst says, I make these 20 page PDF reports with all these columns and numbers. My boss loves it. And my boss loves that every week he can go to this one number.
00:11:01
Speaker
And if I were to create a different product or a different dashboard, there's this word change, right? He's going to have to change how he reads the report or interacts with the visualization. So how do you get organizations as a whole to sort of, I guess, change how they work and how do managers respond to what they're receiving from the people who work for them and their clients?
00:11:25
Speaker
Okay, so I'm going to give you a pretty brutal answer first, then I'm going to give you a more realistic one. All right, everybody be prepared. Yeah, the brutal answer is that you let people know upfront that if they don't change, you're not going to be around very long. And a matter of fact, clock them to three to five years.
00:11:41
Speaker
And let them know that if that is the mode that they plan to operate in, it's not acceptable anymore. Now, the realistic way to do it that we use is we find good use cases from competitors of where they're using analytics. You know, I hate to use another buzz word, but where they're using quote unquote dashboards and BI to transform the organization and what they're currently doing. Typically when people start to see competition, that's doing things, they get more engaged into all.
00:12:06
Speaker
Really? Oh, they have this, they have that. How can we change? Second of all, I have a piece of bait that we use as well. There's two pieces of bait in the mouth strap. The first piece of bait is mobility.
00:12:19
Speaker
Mobility is key. So I was speaking to an IBM executive this morning, John, right before I got on this podcast and he called, he told me, he said, Nico, don't forget about the lean in. And I said, what's that? He said, when you hand executive an iPad with your data and they put their feet up, they sit back and they start paying attention to the data. Mobility will never fail. It enforces change because it's so attractive. The second thing that we find as good bait is geo intelligence.
00:12:48
Speaker
Google has done a lot of work for us. You see those Google Maps? We all use it, we all depend on it. Anytime you throw data on a map, people simply engage. So if you're dealing with the most difficult user, one thing that you could do is think about those two elements and try to change the venue in which people consume their items and that in itself can drive a different behavior. Oh, interesting.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yes, but again, don't say the word change. Don't say the word change. Yes. Lesson for Mika, everybody. Don't say the word change. That's right. Although it is more than four letters, it's still four letters. It becomes a four-letter word. In most people's ears, what they hear is, oh, I don't want to curse on the podcast.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, we'll keep it clean. But what I think, but what you're saying is when they hear the word change, they're hearing that, I'm guessing right, that what they're hearing is what they've been doing for so long is wrong. And now they need to do something that's right. And that is a big lift for people.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, and scientifically, if you want me to jump into it, do you know what dopamine is? Have you ever heard of dopamine? Right. Dopamine is the pleasure principle in our brain. It has been proven that when we see stories, visual stuff, we get a release of dopamine that makes us feel great. When you see the word change,
00:13:59
Speaker
You have the opposite effect. There's no dopamine. The mind closes, right? So you got to think about, and words are important. That's why storytelling is important. You got to think about how you're saying it. So what we tend to do again is instead of focusing on beating people over the head, which is what we see in fail-off, you got to do this. We got to do that. We meet them where they are. Everybody loves tablets. Everybody loves iPhone. I don't know a single person who has not used Google map. How do you get around? Right.
00:14:28
Speaker
Right? So let me meet you where you are and why don't we start from there. Right. So that's kind of what we try to do. We try to meet people where they are, change the venue a little bit, go to somewhere that they're comfortable and then draw them out versus saying you have to go and change this. Right. That manager that you have that's looking at the report. What about putting us on iPad? He's not going to keep scrolling 20 pages on iPad, John. Yeah, right. It's not going to happen. Yeah. So people are changing. They just don't know they're changing. Exactly. It's very tricky.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yes, it is. It's psychology. But let me ask you, are you going to scroll 20 pages on an iPod? Absolutely not. Yeah. Right. So instead of telling you not to do it, I'm going to make it impossible for you to do it and I'm going to force you to realize you only want two screens because you don't want to sit, your fingers are going to get tired. Right.
00:15:17
Speaker
I want to come back to the tablet in a moment because I first want to ask you about the tools that you're using when you're creating these dashboards. And I want to come back to the tablet discussion and how the tools differ between sort of a desktop interface or desktop experience versus the tablet experience. So what tools are you using or I don't want to say promoting, but what are the main things that you're using to affect change in organizations?
00:15:44
Speaker
So to be honest with you, we don't promote anything. Even though I run my company and I have a great team that I work with, I am an addict of visualizations. It's a little bit of a problem sometimes. I'm a Canva addict. What addict means is when I sit in a cab and I have a 30-minute ride, I open Canva and shut everything else off.
00:16:07
Speaker
Okay, so you have to understand. And what addict means is on the weekend when I think about relaxing, I open camp and I start building. Right. My second one is picto chart. I love, I love infographics. So I love picto chart and info and info.gram. Those are amazing.
00:16:22
Speaker
But if you get into more, and I use those for visualizing, for black and white mock-ups, I love Tiger mock-up, old Balsamic, and for those who are writing this down, it's Balsamic with a Q, and John, I'll give you all these notes. And then for enterprise deployments, like people who want to now put it into interactive visualizations, which you can do in picture chart, we obviously do SAP, BI, business objects, right? We have Lumira, Excelsix Design Studio, we also do Tableau, and we do QuickTech.
00:16:51
Speaker
Wow, so you've got a whole, that's a whole library of things. It's a toy chest. Yeah, it's a toy chest and presumably for each client you're saying, these are the two things that you need and these are the two things or three things that you guys need, right? Yes, it is a bit of a toy chest. There is, I have to admit, I went and did a search, John, probably last week or week before I found 150 BI tools. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And my guess would be that that number is an explosion over the last two or three years.
00:17:19
Speaker
Absolutely. When Tableau started finally eating some market share in a BI round, everybody saw the rainbow.
Dashboards on Tablets vs Desktops
00:17:28
Speaker
Let's peel back a little bit to the tablet world. Tool agnostic here, do you see a difference in how people interact with dashboards or visualizations, but specifically with dashboards in the desktop world versus the tablet world? Absolutely. This is the thing. The great thing about a tablet is that it's always with you.
00:17:49
Speaker
And people don't only use it for, you know, there's, you, you probably have to admit that you, I don't know about you. I tend to leave my computer home. I just, it's, it's, it's not big. I have an ear, but it feels big because Apple is spoilers. And so what do I walk with the iPhone on it and my iPad, right? And that's my source. Now what's on there is everything from my gym music to my running trail to, and guess what happens on there as well. My work does.
00:18:14
Speaker
So what I tell people, the desktop to me is kind of becoming a little bit of a dinosaur. It's this thing that you do at work versus the tablet is a thing that I do all the time. I watch movies, I talk to my kids, I check my data, I check my email. So I think that the experience that you see with tablets is that it's more fluid versus where you have the computer. I open it and I'm doing this specific task. And I think that you get user adoption better because of that. It's a better experience. Oh, okay. Interesting.
00:18:42
Speaker
Well, I suspect we're going to see more of that sort of an acceleration of those differences over the next, you know, five years or so. Well, they're in the industry for business intelligence right now, John, there is, and I've been pushing this for five years, granted, because I'm a Steve Jobs fan. There's a term called mobile first. So for those people who are currently building, the recommendation I have for them is the average tablet is anywhere between, I think seven to 10 inches now. Is that, I think the big iPad I have, something like that. I tell people, build mobile first.
00:19:10
Speaker
Don't go for desktop anymore. Anything that you build, make sure it fits and works on an iPad and desktop will take care of itself. Yeah, interesting. We're running out of time, but I want to flip very quickly to your presentation process and design because you're a pretty sought after speaker.
Design Techniques with Post-its and Flip Charts
00:19:31
Speaker
As far as I can tell, you're like the keynote or basically virtually every big BI conference.
00:19:37
Speaker
on the planet, and maybe other planets, I don't know. So I want to ask you, because I have another podcast on presentation design and write about that, I want to ask you about your design process when it comes to creating a presentation.
00:19:51
Speaker
Sure. So this is interesting because I think I, even me, I'm a little bit, so John, I admire just to, you know, I truly appreciate this podcast because one of the things that I, when I started, I just want to find people that loved what I love. And I'm sure this podcast for you is a part of that. You just, it's so comforting when you find people that don't think it's weird to do Canva in a cab. Canva in a cab. You know, people who care about ugly graphics versus pretty graphics, you feel comfort. So,
00:20:17
Speaker
To get onto my presentation method, this is interesting. People think I spend the majority of the time making my slides pretty. And there is time spent on that. But do you know what I do, John? Very interesting. I am what you call a post-it addict.
00:20:34
Speaker
That means I can outbeat you. I bet you don't have the 22x22 or the 11x13. I get those from Amazon. I don't have those. I do have the Post-it Note Jumbo Pack. Although I will say, and I love the Post-it Notes. We're talking right now. I can see all the Post-it Notes on the wall behind you.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. Although I will say I personally I'm an index card. Everybody knows about me. I'm a three by five. I have two things people know about me. I'm a big index card fan. I'm a big Lego fan index cards. I love because I can take them with me so I can stack my slides right on my yes, and I can put them in I can stack them up and I can take that deck with me and then I can go
00:21:13
Speaker
and do it other places. But are they adhesive? Well they are not adhesive because then I can't unstick them. So here's the funny thing about this. My best friends when it comes, and I hope that your readers will take this, I am addicted to what you see behind my head. You guys can't see this, which is called flip charts and post-its. Right.
00:21:31
Speaker
because of the fluidity. So what I do for my presentations is I typically think about how much time I have. And you know, there's an equation, you notice 45 minutes is probably 15 slides, so on and so forth. So let's assume I have 30 minutes, 10 slides. I take the 10 slides and I apply the Steve Jobs rule where I know that the font has to be above 31. Okay. That means I only get so many words per posted. I craft a single message. Okay.
00:21:57
Speaker
And what I start with is a single word, then becomes a message. Then on my flip chart, I rearrange it until I get the order, and then I draw the picture to meet the message. Yeah, that's great. That's a great process. It's the exact process I think people should be using, which is, for me, it's start analog. When you're done with analog, then you go digital. For me, it's write the Carmine Gallo thing of Twitter-like headlines on each post-it note or each card, stack them together, and then eventually you get into the digital world.
00:22:25
Speaker
Well, have you heard of Design Thinking, John? Because I recommend it to everybody. In SAP, there's a House of School of Design Thinking at Stanford. I did it when it first came out. But it's offered all over now. For those people who are hearing this podcast and want to make a leap jump, I highly recommend it. They're like one or two day events. And they're all over the country. And we're now attending the Design Thinking course. Awesome. I'm going to link to it on the site so people can do it.
00:22:49
Speaker
absolutely amazing and the universities all over offer it you could do it at night too. Great. Mikko, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show. No, this is awesome. Thank you, John. I hope your readers got something out of this. I hope so. I'm sure they did and I look forward to coming down to Atlanta to get my hug. Absolutely. And tell Alberto and Rob Simon, I said, hi, I really love to podcast myself. I told you that before I got on that I had a great time with Alberto and Rob's podcast, learned a lot.
00:23:13
Speaker
Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great. And thanks to everyone for listening. Again, if you have questions or comments, please let me know. And I'm John Twabish, and this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.