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Episode #144: Neil Richards
140 Plays6 years ago
Happy New Year, everyone! And welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! I hope you had a happy and safe holiday season. I’ve got a great lineup of guests coming your way, so stay tuned to hear discussions with authors, designers,...
The post Episode #144: Neil Richards appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
John's Holiday Adventures
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you had some time to rest, relax and recharge, spend some time with friends and family. I was fortunate enough to take some extra time off and spend an extended trip with my kids. Went down to Florida, visit my mom, spent some time at the beach, spent some time at Legoland, some awesome time at Legoland because it's Legoland. And now back to it, back
Upcoming Podcast Episodes
00:00:39
Speaker
to work.
00:00:39
Speaker
So I've got a great set of episodes coming up on the show for you over the next few months. People from the fields of design, data visualization, some authors, some speakers. Hopefully you'll be able to use some of the lessons that they are able to talk about to improve the way that you communicate your data, visualize your data, and talk about your data in front of an audience.
00:01:02
Speaker
So just a few announcements before we get to this first episode of
Supporting the Podcast
00:01:06
Speaker
2019. First off, if you're interested in supporting the show, which I would greatly appreciate, please consider leaving a review with iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or your favorite podcast provider that really helps me out, helps other people know about the show and gets it out there a little bit more.
00:01:23
Speaker
If you're interested in supporting the show financially, you can head over to Patreon. I have a Patreon page set up where you can donate a dollar or two dollars or three dollars a month. That helps me cover the cost of editing the sound, paying for transcription services, web services, all the things that I need to help keep the show running.
Workshops in Amsterdam and DC
00:01:46
Speaker
Now, a couple other announcements about workshops. I'm doing a couple of workshops in January of this month. The first workshop I'm doing is going to be in Amsterdam with Stephanie Posovic. Stephanie and I have taught a few of our data-designed workshops. I will be teaching another workshop in Amsterdam with graphic hunters on January 16th. I believe there are a few slots left, just a couple slots left.
00:02:08
Speaker
So if you're interested in working with us, a full day workshop, a combination of lecture and actually sitting down and making things, please consider joining us on the 16th. The next day, the 17th, I'll be teaching a full day Excel workshop and helping people expand the capabilities of Excel to create better, more effective visualizations.
00:02:32
Speaker
And if you're in DC or anywhere near DC, I'll be working with Brittany Fong on the 31st at the Urban Institute here in DC. We'll be teaching a full day data visualization and Tableau workshop. So again, we'll be talking about best practices in data visualization sort of generally, but also in the tool itself, we'll be making a whole suite of visualizations.
00:02:56
Speaker
They're the announcements. I got those out of the way and now we can move on to this week's episode.
Introducing Neil Richards
00:03:01
Speaker
And so to kick off 2019, I'm really excited to have Neil Richards join me on the show. Neil is a data visualization practitioner and he's an information designer. He's based in the UK. He's a Tableau Zen Master. He does some incredible data visualization work with Tableau.
00:03:18
Speaker
As I talk about in the interview with Neil, he sort of came onto my radar about six to eight months ago. And some of his writings has really caught my eye, his visualizations have caught my eye, of course. And so it was really a pleasure to sit down with Neil and talk about the work that he's been doing and what he's looking forward to do over the next few months, at least going into 2019.
00:03:42
Speaker
So again, a Happy New Year. I hope you had a great break. And so on to the first episode of the PolicyBiz podcast for 2019.
Journey to Tableau Zen Mastery
00:03:55
Speaker
All right, Neil. Well, thanks for coming on the show. Happy New Year to you. Thank you, John. Happy New Year to you, too. Thanks for inviting me on. I'm very, very privileged. Oh, well, I'm excited that you would even consider the show being a show of privilege. Thank you. So I'm excited to talk about all the work that you've been doing, especially, I think, you know, at least you've sort of come on my rate in the last six to eight months or so.
00:04:20
Speaker
doing some pretty incredible stuff with Tableau. When did you become a Tableau Zen Master, by the way?
00:04:27
Speaker
Oh, well, I think I became a Tableau Zen Master towards the beginning of this year. They tend to be awarded for a calendar year. Right. I think it was around about February, the award came through. I was somewhat surprised to say the least. I had to reread the email a few times. I thought I was being asked to nominate someone else for a Zen Master. And I thought, well, I've got a few good ideas. Right. Now it turned out that they wanted me to be one. So yeah. Yeah. Well, that's right. Do you walk around with a little metal hanging around your neck all the time?
00:04:55
Speaker
Well, I should do really. I've got some Zen Master t-shirts, but that doesn't really count. People don't really know what that means in rural partnership. Right. Well, maybe you could talk a little bit about yourself and your background for folks to kind of get a sense of the work that you're doing and then we can talk about the work that you've been doing.
Creative Visualization Techniques
00:05:14
Speaker
Sure. Okay. So we've spoken about Tableau and I've been using that for about three years, maybe three and a bit.
00:05:22
Speaker
And I started using that in various jobs that I was working in. I think most of what I've done and have sort of become known for has been
00:05:31
Speaker
outside of the field of what I do at work so it's been maybe visualizations I've put online or maybe community activities that I've taken part in and I've been quite prolific really both in pushing some of the boundaries or putting out some what I consider different or interesting or fun visualizations you know just to try and learn and improve and to put stuff out there
00:05:56
Speaker
And also I've done quite a lot of blogging, which hopefully has been relatively well received. I tend to use it partly to maybe sometimes promote something I've tried or a question I've had, and I like to pose a question out there to anyone who's reading just in case they have any different thoughts on what I'm doing.
00:06:20
Speaker
So those are sort of the kind of the main things I've been involved in really just a bit of blogging and a lot of visualising and just sort of having fun with it as a hobby really to expand my skills and my reach out there.
00:06:33
Speaker
Right, so tell me a little bit about the non-standard chart types that you use. We've talked about it on Twitter a bunch, and I'm always curious about why people decide to move away from the line charts and bar charts. You do a lot of stuff with circles and radar charts and small multiples. I usually find them great and fun to engage with, and I think that's one of the things that you've told me in the past that people sort of
00:07:00
Speaker
you know, maybe a little more likely to engage with them. So explain for us your thought process when you are creating a visualization that has maybe non-standard or non-typical graph forms.
Non-standard vs. Standard Charts
00:07:12
Speaker
Well, that's right. So I mean, partly, partly is because I still consider myself new and learning all the time. And so I feel I'm always going to learn something new. If I think outside of the box, I might well know that
00:07:29
Speaker
the technically best chart type for this would be a bar chart or a line chart or whatever. But if I can think of something more engaging, then I feel I'm going to learn a bit more in doing it.
00:07:43
Speaker
But also, it is very much in the fact of being noticed. And I don't mean me being noticed, but I mean, you know, in this Twitter world of things flying by, it's nice to have something which grabs the attention. Sometimes for the wrong reasons, even. One of my blog posts was, you know, whether we take things too seriously. And, you know, often people might not be overly enamored with the
00:08:09
Speaker
with the analytical message that, let's say, a joy plot will put out because they might say, well, look, we can't see what's behind that peak. We can't see this and that. We can't read the exact numbers like we could on a chart or a bar chart. But I think it's just a case of getting that balance. I have many influences and heroes, if you like, but it's always great to hear someone like Nadi Bremer say,
00:08:37
Speaker
Look beyond the bar chart. Look for a new chart type. Don't necessarily think of the first chart type that you think of. And I think there's no better sort of influence than that as someone who can do beautiful work in the field, just to push the boundaries of the so-called normal correct chart type.
00:08:58
Speaker
So that's really why I like to do it, and I got this sort of, mantras too strong a word, but you know, the fact, intrigue leads to insight. That's kind of my thoughts on what I do. If I see something and it's intriguing, and I see something that it makes me look, then I am likely to spend 30 seconds a minute, five minutes, whatever the sort of requisite time is, just to find a bit more.
00:09:19
Speaker
Right. So you have this sort of public persona where you're playing around persona, maybe not that's a strong term, but you have this, this public profile where you're playing around with, with kind of interesting fun data. You're, you're creating some things that are sort of different and fun. And you're trying to, like you said, make a splash on the Twitter stream as it was, you know, flies by.
00:09:39
Speaker
But when you are working with more serious data and you're doing something maybe for work or something that you need a stakeholder really to look at, do you think in the same way? Like, I'm going to share this with my boss or a colleague or this is a more serious topic. I'm going to fall back on the more standard graph types. Or do you still say, look, I still need to make something that's different and engaging in a different way.
Professional vs. Creative Visualization
00:10:06
Speaker
And so I'm going to I'm going to try these other form.
00:10:08
Speaker
It's kind of a mix of the two answers. You do know 90% of the time that, you know, whatever you might be thinking that the correct analytical answer or the most sensible thing to do is the bar chart or whatever. But it could be that I feel like if you have the mindset that, you know, maybe a Sankey would work in this situation.
00:10:30
Speaker
I do feel you live with experience that you don't know it wouldn't work and it is not the right thing to do but if you have these things in your in your armory or in your vocabulary and you're prepared to think of them. There will be that one chart in a hundred where you could think no we could do something different here and why don't we explain this and i was listening to.
00:10:52
Speaker
Cole Knaflic gave her a talk with Elijah Meeks at the tapestry conference where you were in the recent podcast and he said about how he tried to make a big splash at Netflix with a really funky chunky chart and it died a death.
00:11:11
Speaker
But he said he learned from that, you know, and he held that back. And, you know, a few years later, when the project came back, he thought about it and he thought, well, it needs more explanation. Maybe it needs a better annotation. Maybe it needs a certain different circumstance in which it can be used. And he found that there were circumstances where it was really well received, you know, a few years later with that with that additional experience. I mean, I am sort of keen to
00:11:39
Speaker
to make the distinction between almost, if you like, work-life and fun visualisations. And I wouldn't usually advocate that somebody does a weird and wonderful album cover designed to each other later, profit figures or something like that.
00:11:57
Speaker
I did a workshop with Stephanie Posovic a few weeks ago and we were having this conversation about, I was talking to the people who were at the workshop about pie charts or something and she and I were sort of talking about them and she said, I probably wouldn't use a pie chart because I'm more on this side of I would try to do something.
00:12:15
Speaker
creative and totally different and sort of outside the bounds and for me personally i'd probably be more on the totally the other side right like my first instinct as someone who sort of went through the sort of standard economics field right is to like make a bar chart but there's this whole spectrum of graphs in between and i mean for me at least it's a struggle to move away from that one end and towards the other end um and i'm always trying to think of
00:12:40
Speaker
why would I use something that maybe isn't perceptually as accurate as a bar chart, but it's more engaging, it's a little more fun. And like you said, maybe it makes a splash in the Twitter stream as it
Evolving Graph Preferences
00:12:55
Speaker
rules by. I think it depends what message that you want to tell. I mean, to me, if you need to tell an exact analytical message, then you shouldn't necessarily be going too overly creative with your chart type. But if your message is,
00:13:10
Speaker
why that number is a lot bigger than that or off these categories, look which one really stands out. If you don't need to see that the number, if you don't need to see that 86.3 is way bigger than 19.7, there are so many different ways that you can do that with impact.
00:13:30
Speaker
Everyone knows that let's say you shouldn't compare the size of two circles because the eye might be thinking of it in terms of the radius where really you might be looking at the different ratio of the areas and who can tell which is three times bigger, I can't. But that to me is an example of you can tell the difference between really big and really small. You can tell the difference between those two circles, or you can see that there is a big difference between those two circles.
00:13:58
Speaker
just as easily and in a different and maybe more impactful way than you can between two numbers on a pay. Yeah, I think that's right. In some ways, it goes the other way. Almost the first rule that people learn when they try and pick up so-called best principles is pie charts are bad.
00:14:21
Speaker
And the way of thinking is almost sort of coming around the other way. I would happily use pie charts. I would happily use pie charts for a two or three segment chart that it has a lot of advantages that others don't. So I would never rule out using a pie chart. And again, it's sort of challenging the perceived ideas. Sometimes you've got a square portion on your dashboard that you want to fill and a pie chart will do that perfectly or a donut chart.
00:14:50
Speaker
So I would never, you know, however much of a reputation I might have for sort of coming up with something creative, I would never rule out the easy or the simple or the obvious either. Yeah, so I wholeheartedly agree
Challenging Charting Norms
00:15:02
Speaker
with that. I think the field has sort of turned back towards pie charts, I guess, I don't know, like we don't hate pie charts as we as much as we used to. And I think for me, the past year or so has been an evolution in my thinking about
00:15:14
Speaker
when to use certain graphs, which graphs are good and bad. And I think I've come down that the only graph that I would say never ever use are those radial bar charts where the bars wrap around the circle so that each bar is a different circumference of the circle because they're just perceptually incorrect. You have two values that are both 50, and they end up at the same spot on the circle. And that's just wrong.
00:15:42
Speaker
But I think other than that, I don't know. I don't know if you feel it, but I kind of feel like everything else is up for grabs. I think you're right. And one person that I've been particularly influenced by, if that's the right word, and I need to thank you for this. And one of your recent podcasts is Du Bois, who, I mean, his visualizations probably break every modern rule in the book. And yet they are so striking and get the point across so well.
00:16:10
Speaker
You can't measure the length of those spirals and compare them to some of the other straight lines in there, but you don't need to. So I think within reason, I'm sure we could come up with some other examples that even I would say no, and most people would say no to.
00:16:30
Speaker
I think so long as you use with care and you use with the right context and you use for impact and enjoyment and discussion purposes, then I would say most things are on the book. You only have to look at xenographics to see the amount of fun, interesting child types that are out there if you want to go different.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. So let me ask you this. So tell me a little bit about your Tableau experience. So you've been using it for a few years now. You're a Zen master. You've got the t-shirts and the gold medals and walk around with, you know, with your your feathers out when you go to the Tableau conference. So just can you talk a little bit about what is it about Tableau that you like so much?
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure I've given a great impression here of me strutting around with my same t-shirt on. That doesn't happen too much, I promise. What it is I like so much is I'm under no qualms about it. It is a BI tool first and foremost. And the way that you should use Tableau is to plug your data in to ask it a question and to get a really quick analytic answer, sometimes a sophisticated quick analytic answer, which it can show in a pretty nice visual form.
00:17:46
Speaker
You can use it for that, and you probably should use it only for that, but it has this amazing extra add-on ability to be used.
00:17:55
Speaker
as a data visualization tool. So it's the combination of those two things that I really like. And at work, most of us use it for the first reason that I mentioned, but you can use it as a really sort of nice sophisticated, but accessible data visualization tool to do things that others might consider data art or any type of visualization you want. And the reason I like it is because the chances are
00:18:23
Speaker
most things have been tried or most ideas have been thought about, written about, discussed. There's a community of people who consider help. You can be stuck on the most simplest of things and you can Google it and you can be pretty sure that somebody from beginner to expert has answered it. Or if you're interested in something a bit more sophisticated or a bit more out there, then
00:18:49
Speaker
People, myself included, like to show people what they've done, like to put up how to do these things. So you really do have a good support network out there. So ultimately, it's through something that I've used for numerous analytical purposes at work, it has introduced me to the first sort of creative hobby, if you like, that I've ever used, using data to make some quite nice creative things.
00:19:19
Speaker
Okay, so I'm curious about how you got into Tableau. What were the data or visualization tools you were using that ultimately led you to go into Tableau and use Tableau?
Engaging Data with Tableau
00:19:29
Speaker
Well, prior to Tableau, I hadn't done much in the way of data visualization. I was very much a data person, but all I'd really done was a couple of charts and simple charts in Excel and relatively simple charts in SPSS and statistical software as well. Really all I'd done was
00:19:49
Speaker
the sort of market research data tables where they just want to see every question and they want to see every question tabulated by every other question so it would literally be pages and pages of excel charts or pages and pages of physical print out tables.
00:20:08
Speaker
So I'm old enough that it was back in the pre-internet days that occasionally it would be 400 sheets of paper all printed off and then put on the back of a motorbike and curried from one agency to another in a different part of the country. So it was very much moving from a dry way of presenting data into visualizing data that made me see the like. And I suppose Tableau, it could have been anything else, but it was
00:20:38
Speaker
the first time where I hadn't just been the intermediary in presenting the data to someone else who was going to find the story in the data or present it visually. It gave me the first opportunity to do that myself. And that's what I really found interesting, really.
00:20:57
Speaker
I've always liked data and data visualization. I used to buy David McAnlis books for the coffee table, that kind of thing. It was just sort of a way into trying that kind of thing for myself for the first time. And it's also interesting how it's like a straight shot into interactive visualizations into building dashboards as opposed to like an Excel graph or an SPSS graph.
00:21:23
Speaker
Well, that's right, yes. I suppose it gives you the feeling that you're presenting something a little more sophisticated, if you like, that you're creating something that's halfway between a static output and something that
00:21:39
Speaker
that's really what i'm trying to say but you know something that's almost more like an app feel to it or something that that's that allows you to to drill down deeper because that's always been you know the case particularly in a lot of the data that i've dealt with professionally that the people want to to drill down deeper into their data and see things sort of sliced and diced in different ways
Static vs. Interactive Visualizations
00:22:03
Speaker
as opposed to the way you were doing it where it's 40 pages and a sort of do that exercise is like. Well, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it used to be a case of, you know, rather than drilling down, it would be sort of showing every layer, literally, you know, layered in sheets of paper like that.
00:22:27
Speaker
It was a good introduction into doing some more interesting stuff, yes, and doing some structured dashboarding.
00:22:35
Speaker
Right. I want to make a statement. I want to get your take on it. Yeah. As someone who's working in Tableau and playing around with different forms and interactivity, I'm going to make a statement. And I just want to just tell me what you think. So here we go. Ready? OK. Ignoring the technical considerations. So ignoring how difficult it is to create a visualization. It is more difficult to communicate a message in static charts than it is in interactive charts.
00:23:05
Speaker
Well I'm not really sure that I agree with that.
00:23:09
Speaker
I suppose, firstly, because most charts that you will see or most charts that most people will consume, whether it's professionally or in the media, they are still static. And indeed, I think most chart packages will still focus on static things. So I think there's a great skill, not a technical skill, but there's a great skill in getting a message across in static charts.
00:23:38
Speaker
I suppose particularly if you talk about interactivity, I wouldn't necessarily always think of interactivity as clicking through and getting different views of charts, that kind of thing, although that can add a lot to what you do. But even let's say your text, even your annotations or your well-written
00:23:58
Speaker
titles. They might not be interactivity in the sense of the word that we think it, but you are still, you are interacting with the chart, you are moving from the data elements to the non-data elements, and it's the non-data elements which are just as crucial in telling that particular story. And I think if that's done well, then you can tell just as much with a static visualisation as you can with a
00:24:27
Speaker
with a dynamic or interactive one. And I think in many ways, if you can do that, if you can convey everything you want to convey on one page, one image, one visualization that doesn't require interaction or that doesn't require a click through or a hover through into something else, then
00:24:48
Speaker
In many ways, that's more powerful. Another question said, you asked about it being more difficult, but I don't think it is more difficult. I think, as you say, ignoring the technical constraints is probably just as possible, let's say, to get that message across in a really good static visualization.
00:25:11
Speaker
Right. The reason I posit that statement and I don't have a, I'm not sure I have a strong view on it, to be honest, is that in some ways, or in many ways, I guess, in interactive charts, or at least in dashboarding, I should say, the creator has the option to give the user everything and to say,
00:25:32
Speaker
you know, go for it, you know, you have filters and sliders and whatever, and you can go, you know, go take a look. Whereas in a static chart, you have to make a decision about what you want to say. And that may just be the difference between a dashboarding approach versus interactive, you know, a different type of interactive graphic.
00:25:50
Speaker
I think you're right. Yeah. And I don't think I think they are sort of different approaches, which require different skills, but I don't think one is more sort of difficult. And let's face it, I love the other kind of child that you say as well. And I should be an Andy Cottbrief here and give my answer as it depends, because I think it's probably quite easy to give an argument for both kinds of both kinds of answer.
00:26:14
Speaker
And from pure dashboarding point of view, certainly a lot of the data that I will work with professionally, there's a lot of data in higher education. And if you put it all out there and give your client the opportunity to slice by all the different dimensions that they might want to, you can create a very powerful dashboard, which can give the user a lot more flexibility and a lot more power. I'm not sure that it answers the question about
00:26:42
Speaker
sending the message though I think if you want to send your own message or so I think if you want to sort of editorialize and you know I think let's face it most visualization is editorializing isn't it because you're already choosing what data you put in the chart if you want to do that then in many ways it's easier to do with a static dashboard it's a bit like exploratory versus explanatory isn't it yeah I think different horses for courses
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah. So let me ask one more question. We're at the beginning of the year. What do you have a plan or a goal or a series of things that you want to work on for at least the next, you know, the beginning of 2019?
Neil's 2019 Visualization Goals
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, certainly, it would be good. Recently, I was at the Tableau conference and I sort of came out with some ambitions, if you like, over the next year or some almost New Year resolutions, if you like, so that sort of feels quite nicely. I'm really quite interested in the idea of collaborations. A lot of what I do, I do by myself, but I'd love to work with more people, to collaborate with more people. I've got to talk to some great people at conferences who've said, you know,
00:27:49
Speaker
why don't we do this or I really like that I've got this idea and the more people you meet the more people have similar ideas to you I might want to take something in a different direction and the idea of combining skills but technically and ideas and creative thoughts really is quite interesting to me so I'd like to do something like that this year.
00:28:11
Speaker
I could talk for a whole podcast about it. I was quite inspired by meeting Georgia Lupe recently as well. And that sort of took me right into the idea of thinking, you know, what can I do to be more like her, to do some of the kind of stuff that she does? And I've already actually sort of had a go at a project that's sort of recreating some of her, the Ted Talk badges in Tableau, and that's been received with quite some interest.
00:28:39
Speaker
And so yeah, so just a few ideas like that. And really, I'm, I still have this this imposter syndrome idea that, you know, here I am on your podcast, and I listen to your podcast to hear, to hear experts and people in the field. And yet, I am slowly trying to become one of those myself. So it's, and I'm still in a little bit of disbelief there. So try and build on that and to do more to
00:29:06
Speaker
I love the idea of training and talking more, and just sort of getting more of these conversations going, like the conversations that we have here, or the conversations I try and start on my website, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we didn't get to talk about the, I mean, you had this great post of blog posts after Tableau conference, and then you had this great post about the Du Bois graphic, so I'll link to all those on the show notes so people can check them out, and of course your Tableau public page.
00:29:34
Speaker
people can check those out as well. Yeah. So, well, I'm looking forward to see what you come up with this year on my reading list. So, happy new year and thanks for coming on the show. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks, John. Happy new year. Thank you for having me on. So, thanks for tuning in. So, until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.