Animate Your Data

Dana Stanley of The Operandi Group shares his insights on making your data stand out. PowerPoint presentations can be tedious and boring. This article recommends other types of technology you can use for data reporting.

Over the past several years there’s been a lot of discussion of ways to make surveys more interactive and engaging. Flash in particular has allowed researchers to be creative in presenting questions, scales, stimuli, and other questionnaire elements.

There’s been less focus on the back end. Most people use PowerPoint to illustrate survey results. That’s fine; PowerPoint is a key tool, but it’s easy to fall into a familiar and dangerous habit - creating a boring presentation with too many slides, too much text and too many numbers.

This YouTube video, called “Chicken Chicken Chicken,” clearly and humorously illustrates the trap to be avoided.

One way to make your data more interesting is to take advantage of Flash, which makes it easy to animate your data - literally. There are a number of Flash-based data presentment tools, but one that’s easily accessible (and free) is the Google Motion Chart gadget.

Motion Chart is based on technology called Trendalyzer developed by Gapminder.org, an organization dedicated to bringing alive data about the world’s economic disparities and other problems. This tool is not particularly new. In fact, here’s an interesting video of Gapminder’s Hans Rosling presenting at the Ted Conference a few years ago.

While the technology may not be brand new, few are taking advantage of this way of making data come alive. What Google has done by gadgetizing Trendalyzer is to make it easy to animate data trends, particularly time-series data.

Check out some of the cool applications of Trendalyzer technology here. I guarantee you’ll be inspired. And I’ll bet you’ll no longer be too chicken to make your data come alive.

- June 2009

This content was provided by The Operandi Group. Visit their website at www.operandigroup.com.