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Two analysts’ paths

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Yesterday I asked business analysts at the Tableau conference in Seattle about their work. Here are two quick sketches.

• One of the two arrived at her present employer six years ago to do the company’s first analysis of its website sales. She used several years of accumulated data to show which content was making money and which wasn’t. When she had organized the job into a routine, she handed it off to someone else and moved to the next question: What parts of the marketing was working? Again, she worked it into a routine and gave the task away. Next: what were visitors doing on the site?… Read the rest “Two analysts’ paths”

A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”

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Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.”

Inside, many charts are so beautiful — at least to a visual analysis fan — that they rival the waterfalls and trees of old Sierra Club coffee table books. It’s on paper so thick — and even smoother than Few’s first book, Show Me the Numbers — that you might feel like you’re flipping postcards.

While Show Me the Numbers was about how to present visualized data, he explains, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques
for Quantitative Analysis is about understanding them, which apparently includes how to make them.… Read the rest “A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It””

CIA’s insights on the psychology of analysis

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Imagine someone writing a book about data analysis without even mentioning software.

“To penetrate the heart and soul of the problem of improving analysis,” writes Richard J. Heuer Jr. in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, “it is necessary to better understand, influence, and guide the mental processes of analysts themselves.” It’s the mind that does the heavy lifting.