The best software for data analysis is the software you forget you're using. It's such a natural extension of your thinking process that you can use it without thinking about the mechanics.
Stephen Few
Stephen Few's 8 Core Principles for data visualization:
- Simplify. Just like an artist can capture the essence of an emotion with just a few lines, good data visualization captures the essence of data, without oversimplifying.
- Compare. We need to be able to compare our data visualizations side by side. We can't hold the details of our data visualizations in our memory. Shift the burden of effort to our eyes.
- Attend. The tool needs to make it easy for us to attend to the data that's really important. Our brains are easily encouraged to pay attention to the relevant or irrelevant details.
- Explore. Data visualization tools should let us just look. Not just to answer a specific question, but to explore data and discover things. Directed and exploratory analysis are equally valid, but we need to be sure that out visualization tool makes both possible.
- POV. Different views of the same data provide different insights. It helps to be able to look at the same data from different perspectives at the same time and see how they fit together.
- Why. More than knowing "what's happening", we need to know "why it's happening". This is where actionable results come from.
- Doubt. Ask more questions, as fast as you can think of them.
- Respond. It's the ability to share our data that leads to global enlightenment.
