Emerging Graphic Tool Gets People Talking

Executives seeking to engage employees in solving company problems may find hope in the emerging science of visualization, the sophisticated graphing of digital information. Our research has found that the compelling presentation of data through visualization’s advanced techniques generates a surprising volume of impassioned conversations. Viewers ask questions, make comments, and suggest theories for why there’s a downward trend here or a data cluster there. That level of engagement could foster the kind of grassroots innovation CEOs dream of. The evidence that viewers like to “talk back” to numbers presented through visualization first arose in work that we did separately on two dissimilar and random-sounding topics: e-mail message archives and baby-name popularity. Since then, further evidence has accumulated at many-eyes.com, a website created by the Visual Communication Lab (part of IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group) for the express purpose of letting people—anyone—experiment for free with some of the latest graphing technology and exchange ideas about the underlying data. A user can upload data in a simple format and specify the parameters and type of graph desired. The software we’ve developed in our lab takes it from there, creating colorful and unusual-looking graphics that yield more information as the user rolls the mouse over them. Playing with Data Visitors to many-eyes.com have used IBM’s visualization software to create thousands of images, such as this treemap showing relative faculty sizes (represented by the sizes of the rectangles) and relative average salaries (color intensity) at a large university. Rolling the mouse yields pop-ups that show underlying data. Treemaps, which look like mosaics of colorful tiles, can simultaneously convey two types of data, such as the relative sizes of population groups and their incomes. Bubble charts, which look like swarms of polka dots, can bring to life a long list of numbers, such as different nations’ oil consumption rates. Tag clouds use font size to show the prevalence of certain phrases in, say, a candidate’s stump speech (perhaps useful for analyzing what’s on the minds of people in a focus group). The data that have been uploaded since the site went live in January 2007 range from university salaries to PlayStation sales to alcohol consumption in Michigan to the deadliest Iraqi cities for U.S. soldiers. Users—many of them anonymous—and IBM researchers have together created more than 10,000 visualizations, which can be embedded in blogs or on personal webpages. As people see their own and others’ data turned into stunning visualizations, which can be customized by each viewer, the lab gathers evidence about the special role that visualization appears to play in prompting conversation and collaboration. We observe scientists posting messages about research findings; activists posting about politics, war, demographics, climate change, and crime; and other visitors posting about practically anything. One visualization of causes of death, usually a topic of interest mainly to actuarial types, was the subject of a dozen comments. But much of the discussion happens elsewhere on the internet: The congressional-watchdog group Sunlight Foundation generated visualizations of spending by Congress, displayed them on a webpage, and sparked widespread discussion of the data in the blogosphere. As corporate data become more complex, we believe visualization will become an increasingly useful business tool. Many Eyes is a public site, so there’s currently little real corporate information on it, but we can imagine several business scenarios in which visualization may help: A team doing a complex market analysis might use a collaborative-visualization intranet site to get a much better understanding than is possible today of the ways in which one month’s data differ from the previous month’s. A company seeking to wring costs out of its supply chain might post a treemap showing items’ relative sourcing expenses, enabling “many eyes”—those of employees and suppliers—to spot new areas for potential savings. A real-time visualization of weather-related bottlenecks in air traffic could help airlines by making travelers more understanding and tolerant of delays. It could also help travelers figure out the best ways to change their flights to avoid holdups. Visualization offers the hope that executives will not only be able to see their firms’ problems more clearly but also be able to promote better collaboration, employee engagement, and companywide understanding of the organization’s challenges.

Emerging Graphic Tool Gets People Talking

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