Pie charts do not speak clearly; they just mumble

Gene Zelazny’s textbook Say It with Charts notes that: “In general, pie charts are the least practical of the five chart forms. They also are the most misused and, worse, the most abused.“

In an eloquent 14-page newsletter article titled Save the Pies for Dessert Stephen Few also argues that pie charts are not a very useful tool for presenting information. Quantitative comparison of percentages on a pie chart requires comparing angles that are spatially in disarray. That is more difficult for people than looking at a simple horizontal bar chart and comparing distances.

Pie charts only work for large differences, which geeks call semi-quantitative comparisons. If you want a quantitative comparison with a pie chart, then you have to mark the percentages on it, so you might as well use a table (or a bar chart). A whole row of pie charts is even worse than one pie chart.

Adding a third dimension and shading just makes a pie chart prettier but harder to interpret. Making it transparent (like you can in MS Excel) reduces it to “dancing bearware” – a gee-whiz effect that add nothing but hoopla.

Practical Rules for Using Color in Charts

In 2004 Stephen Few wrote a book called Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. In a 13 page paper on Practical rules for using color in charts he discusses and illustrates nine rules of graphics, which are:

Rule 1: If you want different objects of the same color in a table or graph to look the same, make sure that the background (the color that surrounds them) is consistent. (A gradient background just adds confusion).

Rule 2: If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.

Rule 3: Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.

Rule 4: Use different colors only when they correspond to differences of meaning in the data. (Adding a different color for each country to a bar chart adds nothing when you already have identified their names).

Rule 5: Use soft, natural colors to display most information, and bright colors and/or dark colors to highlight information that requires greater attention. (He gives an example of palette with eight soft natural and bright highlight colors).

Rule 6: When using color to encode a sequential range of quantitative values, stick with a single hue (or a small set of closely related hues) and vary intensity from pale colors for low values to increasingly darker and brighter colors for high values.

Rule 7: Non-data components of tables and graphs should be displayed just visibly enough to perform their role, but not more so, for excessive salience could cause them to distract attention from the data. (The scales and borders should not visually overwhelm your data).

Rule 8: To guarantee that most people who are colorblind can distinguish groups of data that are color coded, avoid using a combination of red and green in the same display. (About 10% of men cannot tell red from green, and identify traffic lights by position only!)

Rule 9: Avoid using visual effects in graphs. (A plain bar chart is preferable to one with three-dimensional rods).

Recent formats for brief presentations: Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, and Ignite

Lightning Talks are brief presentations (typically just 5 minutes) given at a single session of a conference or other forum. They may have started back in 2000 at Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC). Mark Jason Dominus organized a session with a series of 5 minute talks and then showed up with a gong to enforce the time limit. According to the Wikipedia the tradition of short talks at programming conferences actually goes back further, at least to 1997. Lightning Talks are an excellent format for fitting a variety of viewpoints into a meeting.

Generally there are no limits on the visual aids that can be used for Lightning Talks. There may be none, just still images, or even images plus video. Some brave souls even have (gasp) tried live demonstrations of software. There is a YouTube video of an excellent Lightning Talk on “Ubiquitous Offline Shopping” by Wesley Chun from the 2008 Python conference. There also is a longer YouTube video on “Race Driving 101” by Joe Nuxoll which consists of a 4 minute presentation with still images followed by an amazing driver’s eye-view video of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

However, there also are two more recent formats which add two further and sillier constraints:
(1) exactly 20 still images
(2) each still image shown for exactly either 20 or 15 seconds.

Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”, or the sound of conversation) began in 2003. It was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in Tokyo as a night for young designers to show their work in public. They came up with a “patented” formula of 20 images for 20 seconds each, so each presentation was exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long. Daniel H. Pink wrote approvingly about Pecha Kucha in Wired magazine back in 2007, and then Garr Reynolds also blogged about it.

Ignite is a heresy of Pecha Kucha devised in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. They decided that each image instead should run for only 15 seconds, so each presentation would be exactly 5 minutes long. Both formats unfortunately have been spreading like kudzu or meth labs.

Fixing both the number of images and the time for each image is silly. It is just a kludge: a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Usually a kludge just solves one problem by introducing another. In this case it fixes the global problem of getting through an evening program by screwing up the individual presentations. A fixed timing of 15 or 20 seconds per image is a reasonable way of setting up a photo album to run by itself in a digital picture frame. It is a lousy way to force a human being to do a presentation. Personally I don’t see any advantage to being drafted into the PowerPoint Marines Military Marching Band.

Now, there is actually nothing new about the advantage of a brief presentation format. In 1996 Ron Hoff wrote a book called Say It in Six (subtitled How to say exactly what you mean in six minutes or less). Hoff in turn borrowed the brief format from Toastmasters International. Their Competent Communication basic manual teaches how to do public speaking via a series of 10 speeches. Eight of those speeches have time limits of 5 to 7 minutes. Counting an over-run allowance of 30 seconds, their upper limit is 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Now, I’m not sure if that speech limit goes all the way back to the founding of Toastmasters in 1924. I do know that they have not changed it for the past 25 years!

Storytelling: The Endless Tale

The Endless Tale is the title of a column on storytelling in the wonderful quarterly folk music magazine, Sing Out. It is written by Dan Keding, and also has the breathtakingly long subtitle of Storytelling: its events, tellers, stories, organizations, resources & points of discussion. Some of Dan’s columns open by telling specific short tales. Two examples are:

Spring 2008 - The old woman who outwitted death ( web link here).
Summer 2002 – A full cup (web link here)

The first column also contains a discussion of endings. The second column also contains a discussion of short (or small) tales, and lists four books that contain collections of them.

If you want to see more stories, then try this list of some storytelling web sites.

Folk songs are poetic tales set to music, like Richard Thompson’s Beeswing.

Props for the courtroom are called demonstrative evidence

In legal terminology props for the courtroom are somewhat grandly called demonstrative evidence. An old Chinese proverb says: “tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand”. The proverb is quoted is from an article by a forensic engineering company that also contains an excellent cartoon about the futility of detailed verbiage alone.

Both lawyers and expert witnesses know that most jurors think visually. They use props for showing in addition to verbally telling their story. Props were repeatedly used by the Los Angeles trial lawyer Earl Rogers, who was the basis for the TV character Perry Mason. More recently a demonstration involving gloves was an important part of the defense in the infamous OJ Simpson trial.

The abstract concepts of conservation of momentum and energy are the basis for vehicle accident reconstruction, as described in a recent Slate article on The Ferrari that split in half. Most professors of mechanical engineering could put a jury to sleep in less than five minutes by discussing the concepts starting with words, and then continuing with unfamiliar equations written on a flip chart.

About twenty years ago I saw a video of an expert testifying brilliantly on this topic. The lawyer called the professor up to the stand. He walked up with a box containing two brightly colored basketballs in one hand. The other hand was dribbling a third basketball. All the jurors woke up. Then he got down on his knees on the floor. He rolled one ball at another to illustrate a collision. Also, he told the jurors that some actually were familiar with momentum transfer from playing billiards or pool. He only started to tell them after he’d already both shown them and involved them.

Give 'em props

Sometimes props can improve a speech. Both Tom Antion and Lenn Millbower have discussed the use of props as visual aids. A simple, inexpensive prop can be effective. Ellen Hermens describes a speaker who just placed a paper circle on the floor and stood on it to show that “this is my point of view”. Then he stepped away and took a critical look at that point of view from another angle.

To be effective a prop needs to be large enough to be seen by the entire audience. You can buy very realistic (and expensive) props from GreatBigStuff. Or, you can buy less expensive foam props from clown shops like PeachyKeene or Clown Antics.

There also are novelty suppliers like Archie Mcphee. Somewhere out there is a Toastmaster who would enjoy their giant inflatable mattress shaped like a slice of toast. They also have large pencils, pens, ears, scissors and hearts.

A great comedian can take a very simple prop and use it to tell many stories. The TV show “Whose Line is This Anyway?” had a segment just on props.

The most famous use of a prop in public speaking was by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations on October 12, 1960. Khrushchev simply pounded a shoe on the desk to emphasize his disgust at the remarks made by another speaker. His granddaughter Nina claimed this was an impromptu gesture. It had been a hot day. He had taken off his wristwatch and put it on the desk. Nikita’s new shoes were uncomfortably tight, so he’d taken them off and switched to his slippers. When he banged a fist on the desk he accidentally knocked the watch on the floor. Then he saw the shoes, picked one up, and even more loudly banged his way into history.

How to structure a business story in 9 steps

Doug Stevenson recently outlined 9 steps of business story structure in a magazine article on Storytelling – The Art of Customer Engagement which appeared in the July 28 issue of the Life and Health edition of National Underwriter magazine. The steps are:

1. Set the scene
2. Begin the journey
3. Introduce the characters
4. Encounter the obstacle
5. Overcome the obstacle
6. Resolve the story
7. Make the point
8. Ask the question
9. Restate the point

An article on his web site discusses these nine steps in more detail. There also is a handout from one of his ASTD workshops posted elsewhere that ends with the wonderful phrase that “emotion is the fast lane to the brain”.

Stevenson has an interesting history. He wrote a book on storytelling called Never Be Boring Again which he later renamed Doug Stevenson’s Story Theater Method.

In my August 2nd post “Get a running start” I referred to a post from Doug’s blog.