Who knew hot air balloons was the preferred method of transportation in Asia Pacific? I demand all future Microsoft reports to be presented in a similar style.
3 insightful thoughts
Generalized comment on data visualization:
There is a part of me that enjoys visual representations that are colorful and attractive. That part is dwarfed by a part of me that believes unstructured info-graphics are extremely ineffective (and dangerous) means of communication.
There isn’t a logical flow to the colors, images, or data in this info-graphic. It’s a collection of data that becomes hard to read and an exploration activity. One with no clear path as to what your interpretation should be or what is being hypothesized. Not only that but without seeing some of this data in clear context it can be very misleading. Especially simple visual cues like the balloon on the top right which shows three statistics (separate ones) in a single image creating a false sense of more companies planning to adopt cloud than the data (without images) conveys.
As an advertising mechanism I can see this as being useful and flashy, but as a way of sharing data and information I really strongly believe it’s less effective.
As someone who often has an opinion (that I find interesting) on design I would be curious as to your honest take on this diagram and how it represents the data. 🙂
Man, you’re just overwhelmed.
I was able to follow it!
The analogies of the graphs make sense, and the creativity on it is icing on cake.
Good job on this infographic!
Now Microsoft bought Skype for 8 billion what a income for previous skype owner
Comments are closed.
Long Zheng
User experience entrepreneur
Melbourne, Australia
I'm a person and stuff. Mostly person, sometimes stuff. Proud introvert.
I make/made stuff people love to use: MyPal: unofficial Melbourne myki mobile app, Omny Studio: enterprise podcast hosting, PTVGlass: Melbourne bus, tram & train timetable on Google Glass, Map2Glass: type and send addresses to Google Glass, SoundGecko: text-to-speech web reader, ChevronWP7: Windows Phone community unlocking, MetroTwit: Twitter app for Windows, Speedo Plus: Windows Phone GPS app, Bing Image Archive: browse daily backgrounds and Windows UI Taskforce: crowdsourced bug tracker.
Generalized comment on data visualization:
There is a part of me that enjoys visual representations that are colorful and attractive. That part is dwarfed by a part of me that believes unstructured info-graphics are extremely ineffective (and dangerous) means of communication.
There isn’t a logical flow to the colors, images, or data in this info-graphic. It’s a collection of data that becomes hard to read and an exploration activity. One with no clear path as to what your interpretation should be or what is being hypothesized. Not only that but without seeing some of this data in clear context it can be very misleading. Especially simple visual cues like the balloon on the top right which shows three statistics (separate ones) in a single image creating a false sense of more companies planning to adopt cloud than the data (without images) conveys.
As an advertising mechanism I can see this as being useful and flashy, but as a way of sharing data and information I really strongly believe it’s less effective.
As someone who often has an opinion (that I find interesting) on design I would be curious as to your honest take on this diagram and how it represents the data. 🙂
Man, you’re just overwhelmed.
I was able to follow it!
The analogies of the graphs make sense, and the creativity on it is icing on cake.
Good job on this infographic!
Now Microsoft bought Skype for 8 billion what a income for previous skype owner