On The Trail

John Udell has an excellent entry this week about “Envisioning Information”, both the Tufte book of the same name, and the actual process. His main message is that current information visualization tools such as Excel are woefully inadequate. I’ll agree with that! I think presenting web analytics data is one of the biggest challenges facing the field today. Excel is stuck in the paper paradigm — anything you do in Excel can be printed out on a big sheet of paper. Why the limit? Computers are excellent at quickly changing the display of data (either in an animation or in response to user interaction) so why doesn’t Excel take advantage of that? Probably two reasons: it is hard to make it easy and people don’t realize the need. Udell also points out Visual i|o which sells software that tries to solve this problem. Unfortunately, Visual i|o doesn’t sell products, they sell “solutions” which, typically, are much more expensive in both time and money. What I want and what the marketplace needs is a $300 product that I can download and use with no fuss and muss.