Avoiding Data Pitfalls

Chapter EightPitfall 7: Design Dangers

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

—Steve Jobs

How We Dress up Data

I don't consider myself an expert designer – far from it – but I did have a unique opportunity in my career to encounter a high volume of very creative data visualizations over an extended period of time. I was asked to head up the global marketing team for the wildly popular and free Tableau Public platform,¹ and I held that role for over 5 years as it grew more than twenty-fold. It was a role I'm very grateful for, and one I'll never forget.

What's so interesting about this platform is that it gives data nerds around the world a chance to apply the skills they develop in their day jobs to passion projects about topics that are interesting to them, from baseball team stats to multiple sclerosis dashboards, from sacred text word usage infographics to Santa Claus trackers. The topics range from silly to serious and the level of difficulty ranges from simple to sophisticated, and you can find everything in between those extremes.

And it isn't just corporate data jockeys set free to create without constraint. You'll also find the work of data journalists telling the stories of our time with data, corporate marketers creating engaging content for campaigns, government agencies giving citizens access to public data, and nonprofits bringing attention to their causes through interactive data.

All of these “authors” have two things ...