On Friday I got to do something I have been putting off for many years – I went to one of Edward Tufte’s one-day courses. If you're not familiar with Tufte, he is the author of four books:
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Envisioning Information
- Visual Explanations
- Beautiful Evidence
If you're at all involved in the information industry, you should own all four. They're beautifully published by Tufte's own publishing house, Graphics Press. They make terrific gifts. Before I get to the highlights, and some of my notes, there was one odd aspect to the day. Every attendee got a wonderfully packaged boxed set of all four books which were shrink-wrapped inside the box. Since I already have all four books, I figured I would give this set as a gift. But Tufte wants everyone to open the books at the course to read and see along as he's teaching, rather than leaving pictures of the pages up on the screen. So to follow along, students, you need to open your textbooks, all four of them to page...This went on all day, as he would flash a picture of the pages he was referring to on the screen for a few seconds and then the screen would go blank so we could look in our books.
Other than that minor inconvenience, the day was fantastic. I came away with plenty of ideas and tips on product design, marketing materials, meetings with customers, prospects, partners - pretty much any method by which you might need to convey information or content could be enhanced by Tufte's techniques and tips.
Here are a few memorable points Tufte made during the day:
With regard to graphics, "find good examples and copy them." The information graphics in Nature magazine and on PLoS are usually excellent. Watson and Crick got a page and half in Nature for their discovery of DNA - the pictures were really important.
Look for things that succeed in the wild. You wouldn't necessarily think a site like the NY Times would work with 400 links on the home page. But it does. Google news also works really well - it delivers content up front, quickly.
Tables outperform graphics for all sets of numbers. Order performance data by performance. Boxes around type actually clutter the presentation. The presentation of information should suggest credibility. It's okay to use some jargon.
This is a terrible graphic from the FEMA website. "Everything leads to disaster."
"Every web page should be 90%+ content, the rest user interface." Tufte quoted Alan Cooper: "No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there was less of it."
People can read about 3 times as fast as you can talk, so it makes sense to hand out something to read before a meeting. This will save time and make for better meetings.
Tufte hates PowerPoint. Towards the end of the day he said, "Steve Ballmer doesn't want to sit through an PowerPoint presentation, he just wants to inflict them on others.
With regard to presentations, Tufte says, "it's not know your audience, it's know your content. Respect your audience - an enormous amount of filtering went on to get them there." One thing I felt good about: he said, "find a supergraphic that will warm people up that talks about you business."
This is Alacra's supergraphic, which takes just a minute to explain. We have a few others that describe our different product offerings, so we're already taking Professor Tufte's advice on that score. Overall it was an excellent day, and as conferences/seminars go pretty reasonably priced at under $400. And you get a copy of each of his four books.
