Review: Now You See It by Stephen Few
Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge and author of Information Dashboard Design has a new visualization book on the shelves: Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis
About the Book
If you liked Few's first book, but want something more in depth on the analysis side of things, then this is probably the book you're looking for. What this book is not is a picture book for some light coffee table reading. Now You See It is for those who really want to dig into their data.
The book is split into three main parts with the bulk of the content in the first two:
- Building Core Skills for Visual Analysis
- Honing Skills for Diverse Types of Visual Analysis
- Further Thoughts and Hopes
The first part places a good bit of emphasis on what visualization is and how you should approach it, while part two gets into specific types of data such as time series, rankings, distributions, and correlations.
There are tons of examples throughout with a graph or chart on just about every page, and while Few specifies the software (e.g. a lot of Tableau) used to create each visualization, it's worth pointing out that Now You See It isn't a guide on how to use a specific type of software. Rather it teaches the principles of good visualization that transfer over to whatever tool you're using.
Who this Book is For
Few teaches visualization for the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley, so naturally, I imagine Now You See It will be especially useful to those in the business world looking to get out of Microsoft Excel defaults. Those who want to learn more about data, but haven't necessarily had much technical training, will probably make get a lot out of this book too.
One downside for me was that Now You See It does read a lot like a textbook - and that was the intention I think - so it's not really a book that I'd keep as a reference within arm's reach. Then again, I've been learning this stuff for some four years now, so I'm probably seeing it differently.
Basically, if you're looking to take a course (or teaching one) in visualization for analysis, this is a good book to have on hand. There's a great amount of detail and a lot of useful information written by an author who clearly knows what he's talking about. But if you want something light for casual reading at the coffee house, you should look elsewhere.
How to Visualize and Compare Distributions
How to Make a Sankey Diagram to Show Flow
Interactive Time Series Chart with Filters
Visualize This
Hi Nathan,
thanks for your review. I have degree in Management Information Systems and am planning to take a Master in Interactive Multimedia, where I’ll have a course in Data Visualization. I think this sounds like a good book for me to get into visualization.
I took Few’s class at Berkeley when he first taught it in 2005. It was a good class and hopefully my classmates have applied it to their work–I certainly have.
He ran the class as a 2 day workshop across 2 weekends. Homework was due before class and there were group exercises in class that applied some of the topics from the lecture and readings.
I thoroughly enjoyed “Now You See It.” While Few certainly includes several references to supporting sources (like a textbook), the writing style falls between a comfortable technical read and an intense coffee table book.
I found myself relaxing while reading it. Often I would flip back-n-forth between pages, studying examples to textual explanations, much like I do when reading a woodworking article. If a re-read a section, I did so, not out of confusion, but out of gaining insight — i..e., “that is so cool!”.
The graphs (figures) on pages 172-175 and page 234 are worth the price of the book — they illustrate how the visualization of data will directly influence your (lack of) undertanding and assumptions about the data.
To quote Few, “the business intelligence industry has largely ignored the fact that intelligence resides in human beings, and that information only becomes valuable when it is understood, not just when it’s made available.” (pg 3). When I read this sentence, I actually felt emotionally charged, especially the part about “intelligence resides in human beings.”
thanks, pete. that’s a good point.
i should point out that i didn’t mean “textbook” as a negative. the writing style is easy to read. Just the format and the amount of information in the book is textbook-like, which could of course be good thing.
I also really enjoyed this book, but take Mr. Few to task on failing to provide much in the way of technical information. He states that understanding data bases, sql, olap, etc are not the purpose of analysis, but glosses over the fact that many analysts have no choice but to be hands on with the data.
I understand that these topics are well outside the scope of this book, but I think a suggested reading page would be very helpful for those of us with out a technical background.
I pointed this out on his blog, and was surprised to find my comment almost immediately deleted. For someone who is so critical of the software that he reviews, he seems to be unable or unwilling to take any criticism of his own work.
So how does this book compare with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information?
Very different. Visual Display focuses more on design while Now You See It focuses on data and patterns.