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Flourish, Canva, and the Future of Data Storytelling: Duncan Clark Returns to the Podcast
446 Plays11 hours ago
In this episode, I’m thrilled to welcome back Duncan Clark from Flourish and Canva to talk about the incredible evolution of both tools over the past few years. We dig into how the Flourish and Canva teams have grown, how they now collaborate, and what that means for users who care about data visualization, storytelling, and workflow. Duncan walks through major updates—including the new Start With Data feature, expanded enterprise security options, and deeper presentation-focused capabilities. We also explore long-standing user requests, dashboarding, and how AI may soon accelerate data-viz workflows. It’s a wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation for anyone who uses—or teaches—data visualization.
Keywords: Flourish, Canva, Duncan Clark, data visualization, data storytelling, interactive graphics, data design, data tools, newsroom visualization, enterprise data security, Start With Data, presentations, dashboards, API visualization, data workflows, information design, PolicyViz Podcast
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Transcript
Year-End Reflections and Flourish's Journey
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. We are slowly getting to the end of the year, which means only a couple more episodes for the calendar year of 2025 for this podcast before I take a little bit of break and head into 2026. With all that said...
00:00:30
Speaker
I am excited to welcome Duncan Clark to the show. Duncan is CEO of Flourish. I was joined by Duncan a few years ago on the show and very excited to have him back. I have really been getting into Flourish over the last year or so. Flourish, as you may know, was purchased by Canva about 20 months ago. So there's some interesting interactions there. I think Flourish is one of those really great browser-based tools that allows Flourish all of us, regardless of our coding chops or our programming skills to go in and create off the shelf, very quick, interactive, responsive data visualizations. And of course, Flourish really has a whole storytelling bent to what they create. So i really appreciate that. And I of course appreciate just this really, really large library of data visualization types that you can access through the tool. So I invited Duncan on the show to talk about the current state of Flourish, how it's working within the sort of broader Canva ecosystem, and also what he sees coming forward or coming soon for Flourish and for those of us who are using it.
00:01:35
Speaker
And I'll also say before we get over to the interview, just to remind you, if you are a Flourish user and if you are interested in learning more about Flourish, I do host a Friends of Flourish Slack workspace. It is just a place for people to get in, chat about what they're doing in Flourish, share the things they're making, learn some best practices, and even get in touch with some of the people at Flourish to get some support for bugs or for feedback or for you know things that they want to see in the tool. So I'll put the link in the show notes to the Friends of Flourish Slack workspace. Hope you'll join us. There's some fun conversations there every so often and how people are using the tool Flourish. Okay, so
Duncan Clark on Flourish's Post-Acquisition Changes
00:02:14
Speaker
that's all for me. Let me head you over to this week's episode of the show with Duncan Clark, CEO of Flourish.
00:02:25
Speaker
Whoa, Duncan Clark. It's been um three and a half years, I think, since we last spoke. Wow, time flies, doesn't it? Time flies when you're having fun and making tools, right? How are you? Good to see you. Oh, that must make me. I'm very well, thank you. Yeah, it's been an amazingly busy few years. bet.
00:02:45
Speaker
Probably only pretty fresh out of the Canva acquisition, of the Flourish acquisition by Canva when we last spoke. Yeah, i think I think it was like summer of 2022 the acquisition lease was announced in maybe January or February of 2022. That's right. Yeah, that's when we released also the first sort light touch integration.
00:03:04
Speaker
I remember actually doing that podcast interview. I was sat in the one meeting room in our old office. Yeah. um And back then, you know, other than the Flourish team, there was no Canva representation in the UK at all. And there were scattering of people around Europe. We've just, like we I just before this did our European, in fact, our EMEA all hands. And we're about 500 people now.
00:03:25
Speaker
um In the UK? Across EMEA. yeah. Yeah. And yeah, probably 300 the UK. And we, um yeah, I'm doing this call from our HQ in Hoxton Square in in Shoreditch. And so it said it's very much a different scale of operation yeah from when we last spoke.
00:03:44
Speaker
For sure. so um Yeah, so maybe we just talk about that. Like, you know, what is it what is it like now? what is the What is the relationship between the Canva team and the Flourish team? How's that all? There are a lot of releases that have come, obviously, last three years, but even like within, I think, April or so, March or April was like ah another big release on the Flourish side. So lot's been happening. So like, um yeah, how how have things gone? How do the teams work together? What's, you know, I guess, like, give us the give us the update.
00:04:12
Speaker
Okay, so yeah so we were acquired and we were, we were you know at the time, obviously, inevitably started as a bit of an island, but there was always this idea built into the acquisition that maybe we could be the seed around which we grew a a broader European operation. And so that's very much happened. And it's extended through to other acquisitions as well. So last year, we acquired Affinity, the amazing pro design tool, um the team for which is based in the UK as well. And the Flourish team, the decision we took at the at the beginning of the acquisition was to keep running Flourish as a sort of thriving, independent startup inside the group, but then also to bring some of that expertise in data viz across to the core Canva product as well, and then to have integration between the two so so you've got the basic and the advanced. And that's worked really well. And what it's meant is we we moved some of the team from Flourish over to Canva.
00:05:04
Speaker
But mostly they stayed on Flourish. But the the native Canva team working on charts and data visits based in the London office alongside the Flourish team. So we've got a real culture of ideas and knowledge sharing there. And and Yeah, so we're very much you know we very much see Flourish now as ah as a product unit inside the the wider
Canva and Flourish: Growth and Team Dynamics
00:05:25
Speaker
Canva org. and Flourish has continued to really thrive. it's um you know It's growing really well. It's got ever more users, ever more customers. Obviously, it's pretty tiny compared to Canva, which you know where we measure the number of monthly active users in the hundreds of millions. And yeah you know the aspiration is to get to a billion users as soon as we can. so
00:05:45
Speaker
um you know it's it's little and large in a way but that's um that that's kind of by design we have a more specialist tool used by leading newsrooms major corporates and data viz specialists and then we have um the the mass market tool um where people just you know have access to what they need without overwhelming them right so can you give folks just a a ballpark sense of the size of the I mean, i don't want to say two teams because that sounds like they're different, but the size of Canva writ large and then the size of Flourish?
00:06:16
Speaker
Sure. So the Canva team is about 5,000 people globally. you know That includes you know like maybe 1,000 people working on customer support and maybe 1,000 people working on templates and graphic design and stuff like that, as well as the engineering team and the sales team and the marketing team. Right. Flourish is probably about 40 people. um And you know there are a couple of people like myself who work across both, but mostly that team is dedicated to Flourish. And we found it works best when people can really give all their attention to one product um so they're not context switching too much, yeah um whilst also sharing as much information with the other teams as possible.
00:06:52
Speaker
so i say Yeah, pretty pretty small, but in our London, you know the London office is probably about 200 people. So the Flourish team looms much larger in in that community. Right, right. So how does it work um in terms of when people are creating, um maybe this is more like a user support question, but like if I'm creating a visualization and flourish in and on the Flourish site versus creating a flourish visualization in Canva. When people ask for help or they want new ideas, like, is that a Canva solution? Is that a flourish solution or is that the people who are the the go-betweens?
00:07:28
Speaker
So you're basically always in one tool or the other, even if you start in Canva and you pop across the Flyerish to make something more advanced, you're then in the Flyerish editor. And we've deliberately not tried to make them look the same because we want it to be clear which tool you're using. And Canva's core product USP is incredible integration and ease of use. So if the second you're doing something that's more complicated or sprawling, you want to be over in a different tool and with its own brand that represents that. um So yeah, basically if you're on the Flourish side, then the the support requests go through to the Flourish team. If you're on the Canva side, they go through to the Canva team. But we now have some support people um you know sitting with the rest of the Canva team, but focusing on Flourish. So it's a bit more it's a bit more of a combined approach than it was when we first launched it.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, I will say shout out to the Flourish customer support team because they are amazing and they are very fast and very good at at at solving these problems I have. That is great to hear. And that's something we really pride ourselves on is being good, not only at getting back to people, but taking seriously and taking almost pleasure in answering those more complicated. Is there any way to achieve this? And sometimes it's a really complicated workaround solution. yeah that One thing we've been really lucky at um with the Flourish team is it's a very slow turnover. So people accumulate a lot of information and knowledge over time. And in fact, you know, almost everyone who was at the company when we were acquired still here four years on. So... Wow. That I think is a it's testament to what a good acquiring company we join. yeah But it's also a testament to the fact that it's just a, you know, happy, productive team who who work really well together. And that obviously helps with customer support because i sure you have experts in customer support themselves, but they also have great working relationships with the engineers or the product managers, whoever else who can can help them whenever they need to.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, a few months ago, just real quick, a few months ago, I pinged the customer support team with this very nuanced, detailed question.
Flourish's Expanding Capabilities in Presentations
00:09:33
Speaker
And we ended up batting emails back and forth of like the best way to solve this particular very strange problem. ah And that was that was pretty fun, you know, emailing with someone that I've never met before and sort of like hacking away at like how to solve this like really detailed little thing that I wanted to get done.
00:09:51
Speaker
um So you mentioned earlier corporations, private sector places using Flourish, newsrooms using Flourish. And I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about where you're seeing Flourish used the most and and some of the successful like use cases of how people are are building things.
00:10:08
Speaker
Totally. i the I mean, the core use case for Flourish has always been, i mean, we grew out of journalism from a web publishing background. And so the core use case has always been embedding charts on other surfaces and especially on existing websites. So whether that's a high traffic news site or the marketing section of a big consultancy company or whether it's a startup,
00:10:29
Speaker
that thing of data to chart to embedded object is is really cool to what we do. And that's actually one thing that fits really well with the Canva integration and the Canva context is Canva is not really like that. Canva is a machine for making documents, reports, and presentations, like the end product. Whereas Flourish is a tool really for making graphics that go elsewhere. So they can go on your website or they can go in Canva. So that's a kind of nice distinction. and and um But what's really interesting is we ask customers as they come in to Flourish,
00:11:02
Speaker
um you know, what they're hoping to be able to achieve with it. And we've noticed an uptick actually in people coming in to make presentations. So I think there's a sort of, there's a trend, maybe a mega trend there where data viz is a sort of specialty, you know, it started off as a bit more of a web thing, a bit more kind of ah a, Mass communication tool and very heavy anchor in journalism. And it sort of extended out also to obviously BI data professionals kind of in companies. And I think what we're starting to see now is just an expectation that data is is done well, where we do most of our data storytelling, which is actually in presentations. I mean, every day billions of PowerPoints are given. Yeah. And they are all data stories. And yet, you know, the tools that people use for those traditionally haven't been great for actually visualizing and telling stories with data. So a lot of what we've done on the Canva side is to say, what would a great data storytelling experience inside a presentation look like? That's, you know, that's
00:12:03
Speaker
led to us adding some core features there like um you know being able to have filters on charts, which there's no other presentation tool that lets you do that, or um being able to have a nested tree map in your Prezzo natively. So we're still sort of experimenting with where the boundary is and and at what point we tell tell people you want more, jump over to Flourish.
00:12:23
Speaker
um But I think that core trend is a really interesting one for Flourish too, that more and more people are actually coming to us because they're making a Prezzo. Yeah. From a lot of my clients, I've seen them move to Flourish. They're building like the monthly or or biweekly board deck in PowerPoint. They burn it as a PDF or whatever, and then they send it around. It's a very big file and it's hard to update and manage. Whereas in Flourish, you can create it in a story where someone could just click left or right and they can interact with it. And it's much easier to update the data every time.
00:13:00
Speaker
you know, every quarter or every month or every week or whatever it is. And you're just sharing a ah URL at that point, right? You're not sharing big file. um The one thing I did, I was curious about is in your experience for private sector companies, particularly private sector companies, and probably not newsrooms who want to keep their data in house or keep it sort of locked down um and not sort of put their stuff up into the browser right
Data Security and User Feedback in Flourish
00:13:24
Speaker
away. What is the, what is the solution that they're trying?
00:13:29
Speaker
So we have a couple of different solutions. So that people people have different levels of sort of guardrails that they want to stay in inside. We've always taken security incredibly seriously. In fact, when we were acquired by Canva, they put the red hat hackers that they Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, I said they at the time, obviously we now have some of the best kind of security engineers in the world trying to always hack into the Canva system. yeah and They were unleashed on Flourish and and the lead hacker was so disappointed that he wasn't able to break in. and yeah don't want tempt fate. We've taken security really seriously. and what we've We've noticed a trend where at the beginning of Flourish, customers would sometimes come to us and say, we want to use this, but we can only use on-prem.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah. And we took a decision. We're just not going to build on-prem. It slows your development cycle too much. So for for non-technical viewers, that means that you're running the software entirely on the local network. There's no cloud presence at all. And then we found people saying, oh, well, we don't need on-prem anymore, but we need local cloud. So you can still be hosted on the cloud, but we want it to be a cloud that we're completely in control of. Right.
00:14:37
Speaker
And now the trend seems to be settling towards but where where everyone seems to be landing is sure the cloud is the future, like everyone is on the cloud. Right. But what you need is really world-class security features, including things like customer managed encryption keys so that even if it's on a shared database, no one can, even if the database was hacked, the customer controls the encryption key that that controls their particular subset of data.
00:15:04
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So we we're actually working on a bunch of features like that um and working really closely with some of our biggest customers to to make sure that meets their needs. um So I guess that's one way, it's just making the cloud more secure. yeah We also launched several years ago an API for our enterprise users. And what that lets you do is actually be completely off grid because Most APIs for data, what they involve doing is taking your data and injecting it into a third-party system. The way our API works is that it actually pulls the visualization template from Flourish
00:15:39
Speaker
puts it into your local system, you pass the data in there and then it renders it there. So you can actually make, you you know whether it's a dashboard or or just a an intranet chart whatever, you can do that without any data going to flourish. So that's kind of almost on-prem. And it also gives you programmatic updates because you're already passing the data in with scripts, you can also update the data with scripts. So that's another way that you can do it. A third way,
00:16:05
Speaker
which is just maybe worth mentioning is how our integration works with Canva. So the way that works is generally, if you're making a ah board deck, you're not going to be publishing that deck as private information. So you might make your complicated chart in Flourish that tells the data story.
00:16:21
Speaker
You go over to Canva, you you add it via the app, and it's fully into interactive embedded chart. right But you've never hit the publish button. So it's actually on an authenticated yeah URL that you can revoke and which is never exposed to the wider world. Oh, interesting. And so that's ah that's a kind of third way. So there are all these different ways, and but it's a really big theme for us because obviously data security is really primary for almost every type of user. Yeah.
00:16:48
Speaker
And are you seeing, I often wonder about this because in Canva, there's a lot of like infographic bespoke templates that, you know, Canva and others have created. Are you seeing people create interactive infographics in Canva where they build out some, you know, beautiful looking frame and then they drop in a bunch of graphs?
00:17:09
Speaker
from Flourish? There are definitely a lot of templates that have charts in. um It's interesting, actually. I was discussing this with the team recently. i think there is a tendency for the sorts of people who do template design to be graphic designers. yeah And of course, you know the the camva team and the sorry of the the Flourish team and the Canva Data Viz team obviously have a much deeper domain knowledge in data. And so, in fact, when we launched Canva Sheets, which we did back in April,
00:17:36
Speaker
we had the Flourish team lean in to support with the templates because someone who's more of a graphic designer by background, right you know they they they might make something that's beautiful, but the use case isn't actually what someone would do with the spreadsheet. yeah yeah So you know one of our wonderful team members, Sham, in um who sits in the Philippines, she really lent in and helped with all those templates to make them more realistic and more and also make sure that the visualizations were good examples that um captured good data viz practice as well. So yeah, I think we can do more there. I think come i think bringing more data domain expertise into the template creation process is a policy.
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Um, okay. So, um, and so I want to talk about two of my bugaboos with flourish and then we can talk about the the future. Okay. okay So, uh, so here's my, here's my biggest complaint. Now this is very detailed, but anybody who's used flourish knows this problem.
00:18:29
Speaker
So you create a visualization and flourish for those who haven't used flourish, by the way, uh, you can just paste your data in and then go make the graph. It's basically that easy. So you paste your data in, you make a graph.
00:18:40
Speaker
change all your settings. And then you say, oh, I need to update the data with another year, whatever it is, copy it, paste it back into flourish. There's a little box that comes up with a little settings word.
00:18:52
Speaker
And if you click the arrow next to settings, it drops down with these couple of checkboxes that basically says, let flourish determine the data format, et cetera, et cetera. And if you fail to uncheck those boxes, it is possible, even likely that all your work gets erased because it it sort of redetermines the the data value. So...
00:19:13
Speaker
So that's my big complaint. So I've i've sent that off to to customer service all the time. but you've got to but but i want but i wanted But you were going to tell me about why it's sort of the UI sort of set up that way. Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting feedback. And I can immediately think of ways that that can and should be improved. The reason we did that is that we introduced the concepts of data typing into Flourish. The first version, all the data was just stored as strings. And that had certain disadvantages.
00:19:41
Speaker
And so we wanted to have type data. And of course, when you type data, you paste the data in, one of the things you need to do is interpret it and guess what type it is, yeah which isn't always trivial because it might be that, you know, you've got special characters in there, like you might written m MAU or M for millions, but actually it's a number. So you need to deal with that stuff. And then the other thing you can do with Flourish, which is quite distinctively Flourish shaped for this category of tool, is that you've got these things called data bindings where you can choose which column to use in which way. Yeah. And...
00:20:12
Speaker
What we found is that if you had a new user coming in, they'd throw their data in. And if you didn't reset the column bindings, then the data bindings, then sometimes the chart would just be broken and users would think, oh, I don't, I don't like this tool. It's not, it's not problem. So what we wanted to make sure is when people throw data in, they always get a working visualization.
00:20:31
Speaker
And what you're saying, I think is that you throw the data and you get the working visualization, then you change it a bit, but you might throw an updated data set in. Right. And I can immediately think of a thing there where you know if the data, column it the inferred column types haven't changed, we should just leave it as is. That would be easy. But maybe there's also a thing where if you uncheck those boxes once, then it's stored in that visualization. You've done that and and and it's persist. So I'm sure, John, that we can solve your problem. but um It's genuinely useful to hear. You know, I think, um you know, we try to be super reactive to user feedback. And um so, yeah, we we really, really value it when you and others let us know where think that there could be an improvement.
00:21:12
Speaker
Well, I appreciate that. And I will. OK, so I will take credit for one thing then, because now this was probably, you know, a year and a half ago when I really started getting into Flourish, I made.
00:21:22
Speaker
I think I made a box and whisker chart with the data on it, which is one of the big things that I really like about Flourish is that you can sort of turn on and off different sort of uncertainty charts for lack of better term. So I'd put this box of whisker plot and it sat on top of the data.
00:21:38
Speaker
And so I wasn't able to actually click on the data points anymore. it was just on the box. And so I complained about that a little bit. And so now there's a toggle where you could say, which one do you interact with? Now I call that the Schwabish toggle, but I don't think that language is, I don't think that's, that's caught on yet, but.
00:21:55
Speaker
Oh, it's great. I mean, we love that when, um, we had, Someone on the team in the early days um called Katie, and she was really anti-legends.
00:22:08
Speaker
She hated legends and she much preferred the thing where you colorize the text. Yeah. um And um so that has actually become known as the Riley legend. She was called Katie Riley. and So we added a feature where you just check a box and if yeah the series name matches some of the text in the title, they would just automatically colorize it with the right color.
00:22:27
Speaker
And so, yeah, there is a bit of a history of naming features, even if informally after people. So now we know. All right. All right. Well, when I when i next time I get over to London and stop by, I expect it to be on a wall somewhere. Okay, so the other, I don't think this is, this is not a a
Flourish's Approach to Dashboards and Storytelling
00:22:44
Speaker
complaint. This is like ah a feature. So if I wanted to create a dashboard in flourish, I can't have my graphs talk to each other. I mean, and we could talk about how you can actually do that. But out of the box, you can't create like a line chart, bar chart and map and have them all talk to each other, which would be a fairly, I would say straightforward, basic dashboard.
00:23:04
Speaker
um And so I'll ask the question in in two ways. um One, ah well, maybe three ways. So one, When Flourish was starting out, was that I assume that was a conscious decision not to sort of ah sort of enable that capabilities, technologically-wise or just you know work-wise. um And then the other two questions are really like, are there plans to enable that in the future out of the box? And then maybe if you want to talk about for folks who are curious about this, how you actually can do this with some more sophisticated programming and stuff around it.
00:23:39
Speaker
Sure. A lot are all around that dashboarding piece. really Yeah, so maybe I'll do it in reverse order. So there is a way to do that at the moment with our API, which is that is an enterprise feature. But the the way that works is that you can render whatever chart you want and pass the data in. So you can even make a a filter or set buttons at the top, update all the charts together. So yeah that's the way that um some customers do it already.
00:24:00
Speaker
Go back to your first question, like, was this part of a conscious decision at the beginning? I would say yes, but only with a time horizon of about six months. In fact, I think one of the first customer feedback calls I ever did was with Alberto Cairo, who was probably like user number eight or something on the Flourish system. right And his feedback was, love it, love it, love it. I want small multiples and want dashboards. And we were like, well, we don't, well, let's do small multiples, but, um, which we did quite early, but we decided shelf dashboards for say six months or so, cause it was be a new top level entity type. Yeah. We did a bit of design on it actually, but, um,
00:24:39
Speaker
We just have never got around to it since. And it's really ah like always the case in a small software company that you have all these different user requests. And some of them sound small, but they turn into big projects, like having shared shared folders was a big one we did recently so that business users can and newsrooms can share, collaborate better. So there's lots of things that come along that you think, well, the user value to our current customers it you know probably just trumps this other idea. But it's always a balance because by adding the ah the the new surfaces, you you open up new types of users. And actually, dashboarding would be sure a really interesting one for for Flourish. So that's definitely something that um I think we're likely to come back to. i mean, the other thing that's interesting is that Canva has moved us a bit in that direction. Because Canva, you can make a whiteboard or a deck or surface or a dock. you can put multiple charts in it all connected to one sheet.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yes. so in a way you can make a basic dashboard now in Canva. And I think that the natural next step might be making it possible to connect those into flourish charts.
00:25:46
Speaker
At which point a lot of that foundational surface layer would be there. Right. i mean I mean, this is a thing about as an example, Tableau, if you want like a really cool bespoke background image,
00:26:00
Speaker
Um, that's not just a solid color and you want different shapes, whatever you have to build that in a Canva or in a Figma or PowerPoint and bring in that image. Whereas I could go to Canva now build out an infographic or a lovely dashboard and then just, you know, just literally drop in my graphs from flourish and, you know, stitch them together and have a dashboard.
00:26:22
Speaker
Totally. And I think that, um, you know, you only need to add a couple of different elements there. Like, yeah. standalone filters that drive different things and you could have something really powerful. So that's definitely an interesting area for us to explore going forward. It's definitely not something we've decided not to do. in Yeah, I just, I mean, now on the other hand, ah it is unclear to me, and this is an idea that's been bouncing around my head now for the last few months,
00:26:48
Speaker
how useful a lot of dashboards actually are for public communication. Now, internally is a different story and then maybe we don't care how they actually look because we're just working together. But you know perhaps a ah straightforward dashboard with a couple of graphs on it makes sense. But I often wonder whether we,
00:27:08
Speaker
ah the dashboarding community makes these you know very lovely, beautiful, intricate things and nobody actually uses it. Oh, completely. and I mean, in a way I was being a bit glib earlier when I just said, oh, we didn't get around to it. But the the the bigger sort of philosophical theme there was we were really conscious when we launched Flourish that we were building a data storytelling tool. And and that focus on storytelling, whether it was on online or in a deck, has always been our sort of guiding star that sort of separates us from other products. And so...
00:27:39
Speaker
I guess that you know that that question of how useful is a dashboard really is something we've we've often asked. I think there are times when they're really useful and and as you know maybe as data viz gets pulled more into presentations and more into internal use cases, then that will become in a really interesting area for us. But yeah, that I couldn't agree more. i think um It's very easy to understand the value that's added by good storytelling. yeah When it comes to dashboards, really, it's a form of analysis visual visual analysis, but it doesn't always get used that way. And um so, yeah, we wouldn't want to go into it just for the sake of it.
00:28:14
Speaker
Right, right. um Okay, ah so I feel like we've solved the major issues of Flourish. i've got I've got all that undressed. um ah Let's talk about the
Future Enhancements: AI and Canva Collaboration
00:28:23
Speaker
the future. um I'm sure you have a bunch of things in the can that you probably can't tell us about, but maybe we could talk about two things. So one is the recent release of the Start With Data tab That's a pretty exciting piece. And then, of course, and a little, I say this with a little bit of a sigh, but I'm sure people are wondering this, like, how's going to show its head and and flourish? And and I mean you could talk about Canva if you want as well, because I know it's it's already in Canva.
00:28:51
Speaker
um But maybe we start with the let's start with data tab and then we can talk about AI. in the future Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, the big picture thinking here and and the thinking for this goes back several years. um as we added more and more visualization types to Flourish, and Flourish has always sort of prided itself in offering more visualization types than most other tools. So you can make Sankey's and chord diagrams and Marimekos and all these different things. um And you can make sort sophisticated combinations of things. like You could put make small multiples, but lay them out on a grid map or whatever. So the more functionality you add, the the challenge is users can feel that they don't know how to choose.
00:29:30
Speaker
And there can be a couple of different bits to that. It might be literally, i feel a bit overwhelmed. Where do I start? But it could also be, I want to try these 10 different visualization approaches with this data, but it's going to take me half an hour. And then I end up with 10 sort of orphan projects in my project list, and it all just feels bit messy. So what we wanted to do was to shortcut a lot of that for the user and get them to value as fast as possible, whilst also encouraging them to explore visualization types that they might not have thought of making in advance.
00:30:06
Speaker
The other bit in the mix there is data formatting. So if you come in to a data vis tool, very often you might have long data rather than wide, or wide rather than long. Or you might have data that's been transposed, so it's ripe for a line chart, but it's laid out differently from how Flourish is expecting et cetera. So what we wanted to do is just have a system where you can just throw in data,
00:30:29
Speaker
We will take care of the formatting and the layout and the manipulation. we will then attach that to different visualization types. We will then render them all with different column binding so you can tell different stories. And we'll just stick them all in front of you so you can say, oh, that one looks good or that's exciting. Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that one. And you click from there to go into the editor. So that's how it works. And it feels, people often assume it's an AI feature because it's quite magical, um the way that it works.
00:30:58
Speaker
But it isn't AI. The way we did it was actually with heuristics. we We analyze the data, we pivot it, we unpivot it, we transpose it. And then what we do is we actually we score it against all the other visualization types in Flourish for what category of data and what characteristics of data they expect. And then we serve them up in the order of how well they've matched. So the idea is it's quite a long list, but the ones at the top are often the ones that work best.
00:31:26
Speaker
And um sometimes you might get you know two different line charts or two different bar charts or two different pack circle diagrams or two different survey visualizations, whatever, because we've actually tried different data binding options as well. So yeah, users love that. it's some I think especially for people who have being Flourish users for a while, sometimes they know what they want to make, but they know it's going to take them five minutes. And now it's like oh, I'm just going to the data in. I know it will come up and I'll click it. And it's suddenly right two seconds rather than 200 seconds. But also for new users, and I think this is something we'll probably push even harder soon.
00:31:58
Speaker
um Like it almost feels to me like you should be able to do this right on the Flourish homepage. you come in, you've never used Flourish before, just throw a spreadsheet in and boom, it's there. So right there's lots of cool stuff I think we can do to further...
00:32:12
Speaker
expose this to users. Currently it's a tab on the template chooser, but um I think it will be more and more prominent over time. Yeah, that is really that is really cool. um without but Without betraying any ah any secrets, or maybe just generally speaking, like what should the Flourish user community like be excited about coming up in the next six months, year, whatever it might be? So we've got a really exciting, um updated offering with Canva coming up. So keep your eyes open for that in the next couple of months. um We've got some really interesting workflow tools coming up. Lots of users have been telling us about um their
00:32:52
Speaker
You know, their desire to to not just have off the shelf templates, but more like homemade ones or custom ones. So there's stuff coming up around that. Those could be more curated. um We've got interesting things coming up around the theme that I mentioned of more and more users being interested in presentations. And we've also got some really interesting InfoSec features launching that will really put us in a sort of enterprise grade situation where, you know, we can confidently tell a financial org, yes, we we meet all your very high-end requirements for investing. So all of that stuff is coming up and loads of more specific things as well. um And yeah, I mean, on the AI question you asked about, we haven't actually launched any AI features inside Flourish yet. We've been quite careful not to do it for the sake of it.
00:33:42
Speaker
And also there's a sort of pricing and costing question, which is, you know, how best a price for it, given that it's not free to run. And um but we've got some really interesting prototypes now running in in the building here where AI is really being used to short circuit, um slightly painful workflow points. And so I think, you know, I would definitely say watch this space in the in the next six months for for the first offerings of of that sort. Because, um yeah, I've been pretty amazed by what a game changer it feels once you're using it
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. um Before I let you go, um what would your recommendation be for folks who are listening to this or like, I'm going to, you know, just getting started. they're like, oh I'm to try out flourish. Like, where would you point them in terms of how to learn how to use the tool and, you know, sort of get on that, that learning curve?
00:34:37
Speaker
I would say, well, start maybe by browsing the examples page, just because that will give you a sense of all the different kinds of things you can do. And also, that gives you a sense of the the story output. So you know you start by making visualization, and then you can tell a story with multiple visualizations. So it's quite useful for inspiration to start by looking at some stories on the example page. Then I would say go in browse the template chooser, um but also click that tab for Start With Data and try just throwing in a spreadsheet, and you will find within five seconds that you've made a bunch of visualization types, some of which you never will have tried before probably.
00:35:15
Speaker
and click through and edit them and let us know how it goes. Yeah, we're we're um more and more kind of when users, when free users are sharing stuff online, we're really keen to share and promote their great work.
00:35:29
Speaker
So yeah, I look forward to seeing what users make. Yeah, terrific. Duncan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been great. And I look forward to seeing all these new features and of course, you know, another Schwabish toggle that we'll doing.
00:35:43
Speaker
Totally, yeah. we'll we'll We'll get the engraving going on the wall. Thanks a lot. appreciate it.
Conclusion and Engagement Encouragement
00:35:49
Speaker
All right. Great chat. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in everyone. I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Duncan Clark. I hope you will check out flourish. If you haven't played with it, you can get a free account really easily. Just sign up.
00:36:02
Speaker
You should also check out the friends of flourish slack workspace where like-minded folks are making visualizations and chatting about them. And of course, once more, please take a moment, rate, review the show, wherever you get it, wherever you listen to it, or give me a thumbs up on YouTube. If you're watching a podcast,
00:36:20
Speaker
And yeah, that's all I got for you. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.