Data and Information the Tufte Way

Edward Tufte’s one-day course on presenting data and information was a broad look at his work and thinking. He began the day by asking participants to do a little reading out of one of his books and then darkened the room to show a large-scale projection of Frédéric Chopin’s Berceuse, Opus 57, as mapped by Stephen Malinowski’s music animation machine. Imagine seeing music. It looked like a project management timeline, only much more stimulating and mesmerizing.

According to Tufte, every meeting or presentation should start with a document people can read, like study hall for grown-ups. One of the biggest problems with the slide model is that people aren’t allowed to bring their own cognitive approach to understanding the information or to make their own decisions about the content upfront. Empowering people to do these things adds up to genuine personalization.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos takes a similar approach at company staff meetings, beginning with a six-page memo that participants read in silence for as long as 30 minutes. “Full sentences are harder to write,” Bezos tells FORTUNE. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

Tufte advocates using text/image relationships as long as they assist understanding of the content, not how stylish the design or page looks. He says, “People have not come to see you put lipstick on a pig. They’ve come to see the info.” In a 2012 Forbes article, “Jeff Bezos and the End of PowerPoint as We Know It,” Carmine Gallo makes a strong case for the power of pictures used in combination with words. He writes, “[Picture Superiority] means that the brain processes information more effectively when the information is presented in pictures and words instead of words alone. Image-rich presentations work effectively because pictures appeal to the right hemisphere of the brain—the emotional side. You can have great ideas backed up by data and logic, but if you don’t connect with people emotionally, it doesn’t matter.” Read Aarron Walter’s book, Designing for Emotion, if you haven’t already, and discover how important it really is to make those connections.

Humans are hardwired in other ways, too. We regularly take in 20 megabits per second through the optic nerve. Essentially, we’re hardwired to interpret high resolutions. Therefore, visualizations should be rich, explanatory and contextual. The point of a visualization is not that it should be understood at a glance. The point is to assist thinking about content.

Tufte’s insights also include:

Think complex, speak simple. 
Don’t use jargon. Use ordinary language to better connect with people.

Craft a believable story.
Don’t cherry-pick content or greenwash. Be transparent. Respect your audience.

Acknowledge others’ work and thinking.
This shows that you’ve done your homework and that you’re open-minded. Also, citing sources lends credibility to your own presentation.

A failed presentation, website or communications tool is often the result of bad content.
Design cannot make bad content better. Do the work to generate relevant and thought-provoking content.

Get rid of unnecessary elements, like chart junk in analytical diagrams.
Designs should be clear, elegant, evidential, maplike and meaningful. Extras won’t do your presentation any favors. They’ll just create noise and distract from what’s relevant.

People will scan (and scroll).
Lists and tables are valuable tools. So are flat surfaces that contain a lot of information in close proximity. A great model is a thoughtfully designed web page.

Aim to incorporate plenty of quantitative information.
An ample amount of data tells a much richer story. View, for example, ESPN.com.

Show small data sets in context.
Either embed data in the text or position it close to the text that describes it in more detail.

Order data by a performance variable.
Alphabetical order is meaningless. Don’t make your audience search for trends. Reveal them.

(The list goes on.)

Pay the money to see Tufte or read his books. His one-day course is full of insights and compelling examples. At the very least, it will change the way you think about information—both online and out in the world.