Comments on: Flash Dashboard Example - Information Visualization about Oil Production

By: mr tom

mr tom — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:22:02 +0000

Yep. That sort of thing. The one I saw was in QlikView, but I think that everybody who supports swf is now developing something like that.

Had a quick look at gapminder. I like it. It’s essentially dashboard porn - adds little to the understanding, but lots of shinyness.

By: krrh

krrh — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:26:13 +0000

I agree with the previous post, the oil dashboard almost provided negative information there was so much distraction from a very small amount of valuable information.

mr tom, were you thinking about something like gapminder? http://www.gapminder.org/ . It is significant in that it’s one of the few examples where the use of a computer screen and user interface help to display *more* information rather than obscuring.

By: mr tom

mr tom — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:55:32 +0000

Interesting one.

The only section that encourages comparison is the table on the left!

The numbers are left to themselves rather than any qualitative statements made about them.

The other 80% (approx) of the screen is left to a picture of an oil derrick and a geography lesson which most of us don’t need, and rather than providing meaningful information about oil supply, it just screams “I can do flash, me” whilst unfortunately not using it to add any value at all.

Or am I wrong? Was this perhaps written for an audience that doesn’t know where the USA is?

I do have a confession to make, though - one which will get me into trouble with the dashboard hardliners - I saw a lovely implementation of flash in a chart in QlikView - essentially it permitted two axes (neither of which was time) with data items plotted across it. The third variable was time, and pressing the play button showed how it all changed with time.

Hardline criticisms - it took time to review the chart, you couldn’t concentrate on all data points at once to see how they moved, meaning you either had to watch it lots of times or just miss the trends and finally it would be no use printed out.

However, none of those things stopped me loving it.