Why I’m Not In Love with Prezi

It’s time to write this post. This may be the most frequently asked question in my workshops on evaluation reporting, data visualization, and graphic design.  What do I think about Prezi?

Most people’s first reaction to being in the audience of a Prezi presentation is “Wow, that is so cool. This is going to change my whole life.”

But that’s not what we want people thinking when they are in our audiences.

We want them listening to us. Digesting our words. Relating our message to their own experiences. Getting activated to go make changes in the world. We don’t want them distracted by our dizzying presentation software. This, sorry folks, is probably the same reaction audiences had to the introduction of those clever fly-in animation tools in PowerPoint.

I understand Prezi is working to provide more control over the quick zooming in and out, after early reports that some audience members were getting motion sickness. That’s a good development and a smart response to user feedback.

Even still, I find Prezi vastly too limiting. While all manners of media can be embedded in the show, the predetermined font choices are insufficient in that they’d threaten an organization’s existing identity and branding system.

Prezi also crashed around May 9. A desktop version is available, but for those who had relied on the online version of Prezi so they only had to be concerned about an internet connection, there may be a bit of a false sense of security in the platform. Prezi crashes seem rare and the company offered free 1 year trials of their Pro version for all who were affected. Nice handling of a tricky situation. But I’m not in love.

Beer Delivery Visualization

Time to tackle some of the more important parts of life. I saw this delivery schedule in a cooler at a DC Whole Foods. Bell’s Beer is from Kalamazoo and we take pretty big pride in our hometown beer. So we (I mean, I) get really geeked when Bell’s shows up during travels. But this delivery schedule? It’s not working for this data visualizationist (I just made that term up – how does it sound?).

I couldn’t put my finger on precisely what bothered me so much about it, so I took a snapshot and mulled it over for a few weeks. Here is the revised chart I settled on.

The revision still isn’t sitting right with me, but I’ll tell you what important changes I did make:

1. I reversed the order of the listings. Previously, the beers that are delivered year-round were closest to the headers listing the months. That meant that the ones that were the most narrowly distributed were furthest away from the month listings, making them the hardest to decipher. In the revised version, I also just put the month listings across the bottom of the chart, too. Why not?

2. The beers are in a very slightly different order, now depicted by the length of months they are on the market. Just adding a little more logic.

3. The labels over the bars make for less seek-and-find. Previously, the viewer would have to locate the desired beer label, trace the bar to the right, and then simultaneously locate the months across the top, traveling that information down the graph, to find where the paths crossed, just to determine if Favorite Beer was in stock. Too much. This way, we remove one element of difficulty in decoding the chart. Still, I’m unhappy with how I had to abbreviate the top two beers to make them fit in the label.

4. White background. The textured orange background (intended to be beer) was too busy and conflicted with the colors used to differentiate each bar. I’m not totally in love with my new color scheme, but it’s a step up.

If I had access to the beer label icons, I would have still placed them along the left side of the chart. That visual cue is important for the viewer to quickly identify the beer in question.

Image Searching Made Easy(er)

We all love to see large engaging images in evaluation reporting, but it sure can be a pain in the butt to be the one behind the computer monitor, scrolling through pages of images in search for the right one. Typically, this process takes weeding through a lot of eye-strain inducing junk. My friend and colleague Susan Kistler has curated a list of free stock photo sites that do cut down on some of the tedium. While those sites can help, they are often paired with poor search engines that still make the work a bit burdensome.

This is where Google Images can help. “Google Images? That treasure-trove of crap?” I hear you ask. Well, yes. Yes, there is a lot of crap and lots of what you’d find in a straight Google Images search isn’t even licensed such that you can copy and paste it for your own slides or reports. But here’s the way to use the powerful Google search engine to find licensed images for your next evaluation report.

Let’s say I’m working on a project related to family health and I want some cute shots of families for my slideshow. This is what a typical Google Image search would produce:

There are 8 billion results (including – creepy – photos from my friends)! Insane! And as you can see from this screenshot, some of it is garbage. Some of it is also really great – wow, those would be nice pictures to have in the report. It isn’t apparent here, but most of those nice happy family photos are illegal to copy and paste. Unless they are licensed for use by others, you can’t take it for your report.

But in the upper right of your Google screen, you’ll see a little button with a picture of a gear on it. That will open up this advanced search function within Google Images.

Here, you can save yourself a bundle of time. Choose medium or large sized images so that the ones you find don’t blur when you expand them to fill your slide or page. Choose the photo format to get rid of the clip art. And look at the menu under usage rights. Depending on your organization, what you want to do with the image, and how you’ll use the report, you should choose one of the last four options there.

Now searching on something generic like “family” will still probably bring back too many results. I’ve already written here about the need to clarify your thoughts about what you want to look for. So with a few more keywords and the parameters I set above, here’s what my advanced search returned:

I’m now down to just 463 results. Wow.

Sure, there’s still some junk in there, but it’s far less to wade through. And I know all of it is free for me to copy and paste and use. And its going to be a suitable size. AND I can see some cute baby pics I’d like to snap up right there. Pinches on those chubby cheeks.

A couple of other awesome things: See the blue bar at the top of the photos? Once you enter your parameters in the advanced search page, they stick until you change them, even if you type in new search words. Nice. Now look for the button next to the gear that says “Safe Search On.” Do double check that you move this from the default (which is Moderate) to Strict to save yourself from NSFW surprises.

With just a few extra clicks, you can save yourself from hours of scrolling to find images that work. And, on occasion, I find that nothing on Google Images will work for me. At least I can come to that conclusion in about a minute and then move on to the paid stock photo sites from there. This is a worthwhile first stop for small evaluation consulting shops and nonprofits on tight budgets. Happy reporting.

City Branding: Miami

A few weeks ago I was letting the sunshine in Miami love me (well, it was mutual) when my partner commented that Miami really has it’s own color scheme and font, beyond it’s famed art deco architecture. It’s always been a touch puzzling to me when designer people talk about expressing personality of something through elements like typeface, color, and other design elements. But in Miami, this was crystal clear.

Below is the sign for a mall near the Coral Gables neighborhood. Granted, it is a new mall, but the sign designers skillfully tapped into the flavor of Miami.

Notice the slim retro font. That’s Miami. Notice the color-based three dimensions. That’s Miami. Notice the colors! So very Miami. In fact, it inspired me to develop a Miami color scheme, using Adobe Kuler:

The Adobe Kuler program is pretty easy to work with. I’ve used it before to pull colors from an image. In this case, with just my sun-filled memories, I simply moved the markers on the color wheel and adjusted the sliderules under each color square until I felt like I was back on A1A, beachfront avenue. I can see going through the same procedure to develop a color scheme based on a classroom observation, a rural site visit, or set of interviews with inmates. How could you represent the flavor of your evaluation project?

The Cost of Bad Design

The next time someone asks me how good data visualization actually contributes to a better bottom line, I’m going to retell this story.

Some time ago, I sat in a meeting with 11 other people. We were reviewing evaluation findings, presented via charts, which were created by another researcher (not present). You know this scene. You’ve been there a hundred times. The group spent 20 minutes just trying to dissect a single chart. It wasn’t the data that was confusing. It wasn’t the chart type, either. But it was the little things like color and labeling that confused the 11 of us (an educated group, too, I should point out). So what did that bad design cost?

6 people are paid $600/day, which means we spent $150 on their confusion
1 person at $400/day = $17
1 person at $300/day =  $13
1 person at $250/day = $10
2 people at $1,000/day = $83

So one poor chart design cost our group $273, which is actually more than the daily rate (salary and benefits) for one of the meeting attendees.

Ouch. And this doesn’t include the time it took for the report author to develop the poor chart in the first place, or the time that person will put in to make the chart clearer. Bad design is expensive. Thus, investment in some professional development around good design or even consultation with an actual graphic design may literally pay off in the end.

What Bad Grouping Looks Like

Toy designers beware. Do not put your products into my little dude’s hands because I am an ex-teacher AND now I’m a professional evaluator AND I care about design. Look, just LOOK, at this deck of cards my son came home with. Notice the problem (aside from the fact they are shaped like snowmen)?

The issue, you noticed, is that the category markers (symbol and number) are too close and too similar to the actual counting symbols placed in the middle of the card.

Here’s the corresponding lesson for evaluation report authors: when we use headers to signal an organization to a report, make the header really really really clearly different from the narrative text. When working with headers, we can use font, color, and other emphasis techniques to make the headers clearly distinguished from the text.

Now, with these playing cards, they may not be able to change the color – but there are other options. The category markers could be much smaller. Or much larger.  Or positioned further away from the counting symbols in the middle. The counting symbols in the middle could also be squished closer together. In other words, there could be better grouping of elements (graphic designer Timothy Samara calls this technique “squish and separate” in his awesome book Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual).

PS. The blogging schedule will cut in half to twice per month – I’ve got a book to put out! Sage has contracted with me to write a book on evaluation reporting, scheduled to be released in Spring 2014.

Eye Gaze & Image Placement

I went to my favorite city in the world a couple of weeks ago – Washington DC. Of course, I didn’t have enough time to explore everything I’d wanted, which included the new Museum of African American History and Culture. But I did catch the promotional signage in the Metro (and one for the Museum of African Art). Let’s pick them apart a bit, shall we?

In this first photo (sorry its so dim around the edges, but I was in the Metro after all), the designers used the power of eye gaze to both draw in the viewer and then direct the viewer’s attention toward the supporting text.

The photo of the artifact was taken at a slight angle, which gives it directionality and a bit of warmth. Think about how much flatter the ad would be if the photo had been taken fully face on. The directionality of the picture and the smart placement of the image so that eye gaze can support the text really unite the ad. When graphic designers say a design should have “unity” this is part of what they mean.

Now check out the eye gaze and directionality in the second ad.

What struck me about this one the most was that the eyes gazing toward the text seemed to belong to white people and that the black people in the ad were facing away, in a bit of an oppositional stance. Perhaps that’s on purpose, to underscore the struggle that the museum is honoring. Yes, let’s suppose that’s the case.

Whether intentional or not, these two ads remind us that there is power in the eyes. When we feature people in our evaluation reporting, position the photo so that the subjects are facing the text, focused internally, rather than literally having their backs turned to the content.

Moving Emphasis

As much as I advocate for minimalistic slide design, sometimes that just can’t happen. Sometimes you’ve gotta have a lot of words or a logic model or diagram to show. I previously showed one strategy for handling this – the Slow Reveal. But incrementally revealing parts of a complex image might not work for you. So here’s another strategy – Moving Emphasis.

Let’s say I was trying to explain to an audience how they can submit a proposal for the American Evaluation Association 2012 conference. My slide might look like this:

I need to show the whole screenshot here so I can illustrate the proposal submission process while also talking about the individual pieces. But instead of projecting this single screenshot, which would lose visual interest quickly, I can begin using arrows, circles, and other emphasis techniques, like this:

This was as simple as inserting an arrow shape in PowerPoint. Then, as I talk about the next bit, I move to the next slide. Same screenshot, different part emphasized:

I just inserted a text box and a circle shape to draw the viewer’s attention where I want it to go. This way, I can help my listeners better track my own words because the visual matches my verbal pace.

I like this red because it is so good at drawing attention (image how the effect would be lessened with black, for example), but you could even customize the moving emphasis to match your project’s colors.

When we use Moving Emphasis as a technique, it allows us to keep the same visual – which is really helpful in some circumstances, like websites. So we capitalize on attention-grabbing elements like circles and arrows to guide attention and maintain visual interest. Have fun!

How to Keep Parents in the Dark

Report card time in the Evergreen household! We have a kindergartener, so this is our first venture into decoding the marks representing his progress. Among other assessments, he’s given a standardized test throughout the year to measure his emergent literacy. Because it looks nothing like the rest of the report card materials, I’m assuming the standardized test company spits out this profile report. I am a newly minted PhD and it took me several attempts, spread a few days apart, to understand what this is trying to tell me:

This is chartjunk, in its finest form.

Let’s hone in on one as our example. This is the one in the upper left:

Here’s how I remade that graph:

These are the differences that make the difference:

1. I put the legend right in the graph. Previously, it was too far away.

2. I simplified the language. This test company was speaking test company-ese. I did this too in my first job. I worked the drive-thru (spelled like that) at McDonald’s and I asked the customer if he wanted his drink to be a “16 ounce.”  He had no idea what I was talking about, of course. Let’s use language that really matters to people.

3. I added an explanation about what this test measures, right under the title. Again, make it matter to people.

4. I removed the gridlines – just chartjunk there.

5. I made the text bigger. The original version of this document wasted the bottom half of this page. Now, a page doesn’t need to be crammed with information, but trading in more readable text caters to parents.

6. I took out the target bar (why a bar?) and replaced them with actual scores.

7. I took out the months along the x axis. What’s more important is the start of the year and the end of the year.

8. I removed the “progress monitoring assessment” circles. I assume these are the interim tests conducted by the teacher. I don’t really need to know these. These seem more important for the teacher or the school to know. For a parent report, I just need to know where my kid is at each report card, compared to where he’s supposed to be.

9. I removed the word “kindergarten” from the bottom of the x axis. I know my kid is in kindergarten. And it also says so in the information listed in the top left of the page. And under every other x axis.

10. I took out “DIBELS Next” from each y axis. Again, this is listed at the top of the page. Plus, this information doesn’t really mean anything to me as a parent.

11. I eliminated “FSF” from the y-axis. I’m confident this stands for “First Sound Fluency,” which is already labeled in the chart title. Redundancy removed.

12. I added color to each data point to more easily distinguish actual performance from the target. I also assigned them different icons.

13. I grayed out the text pertaining to the start of the year (which I saw at his first report card) and the end of the year, since those are really just reference points.

So I made 13 adjustments and now I’m betting more parents would understand their child’s progress. Sure, it’s a little splashier. Sure, it involves color (but would not necessarily require it, since I also used the icons to distinguish). But this profile report is generated through the testing company software. It doesn’t require extra work on the part of my kid’s awesome teacher. It requires that data companies think more like their consumer, conduct some usability testing, and communicate in ways that people can understand.

I Can Make A Window in Plain English

I can make a window to discuss your parallel logistical innovation.

Sound familiar? Didn’t some evaluation colleague say this at the conference this past year? Did *I* say this at the conference last year?

Nope. It is a randomly generated bit of gobbledygook from the Plain English Campaign. But it sure sounds like some evaluation-speak, doesn’t it? Maybe we aren’t quite as bad as this, but we sure do bolster ourselves with big words and things like this bit here:

You really can’t fail with knowledge-based organisational paradigm shifts.

It’s so close to home it cracks me up.

I found the Plain English Campaign via Sandra Fisher Martin’s TEDx talk on the Right to Understand. In her talk, Sandra illustrates how even the highest-educated citizens cannot decipher complex, jargon-laded documents from courts, legislators, and doctors. She argues that we have a right to understand the documents that impact our daily lives. Oh, evaluators, do you hear the call? We are the guilty.

She says these are the three things we should do when we are in the position of creating documents for public communication (as all evaluators are):

First, start with what information is most important. People aren’t going to read three pages to get to the point. In our world, that means we cut to the chase instead of burying findings on page 50, after we have so carefully explained our methods and limitations.

Second, use short sentences.

Third, use simple words. Write for Grandma in an unpatronizing way. I sit on the IRB at Western Michigan University and we require that consent forms are written at a 6th grade reading level, but depending on the study being explained it sometimes needs to be even simpler. Our evaluation reports should be held to the same level. It isn’t about looking smart to the CEO. It’s about getting evaluation used.

Here’s how to find out the grade level of your reports. In Office 2010, Click on Review>Language>Language Preferences>Proofing and click the check box by Show readability statistics.

Then run spellcheck to get the reading grade level. This blog post is at a 7th grade reading level – a little high.

Back to Sandra’s talk. She also points to the Plan English Campaign’s Crystal Mark, shown here:

For a fee, organizations can apply to the Plain English Campaign to have their document clarity approved, allowing them to affix the Crystal Mark on reproductions. While we may not all be able to afford their seal of approval, we can still heed their advice about the standards, which include:

• the use of ‘everyday’ English;
• consistent and correct use of punctuation and grammar;
• an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words;
• plenty of ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ verbs;
• explanations of technical terms;
• good use of lists;
• words like ‘we’ and ‘you’ instead of ‘the Society’ or ‘the applicant’;
• clear, helpful headings, which stand out from the text; and
• a good typesize and a clear typeface.

I do not foresee the same oversight (even if voluntary) for the field of evaluation, but we can internally hold ourselves accountable for communicating in Plain English (or Spanish or whatever you prefer). We can strive to speak with the acknowledgement that our audiences have a right to understand.