Driving Decisions Creatively
May 12th, 2011 by Branden Kornell
I’ve been on a data privacy kick lately, so it seemed like a good time to review my privacy settings on my major social networks. They’re trying to make it easier for users to manage these settings, with varying degrees of success.
I use LinkedIn extensively for professional contacts. I liked LinkedIn’s privacy settings for three reasons:
1. They’re easy to find.
Privacy settings appear on the first page of “Settings”.
Tags: privacy, social networking
May 5th, 2011 by Branden Kornell
GPS maker TomTom wound up with a black eye last week. Police in the Netherlands had been using TomTom data to determine locations for speed cameras. Customers were not happy to learn that, after buying the navigation equipment and paying subscription fees, the company was (indirectly) arranging for them to get speeding tickets.
The CEO apologized in full-page ads in Dutch newspapers with this dubious statement:
We did not anticipate this kind of use and many of our customers are not happy about it. We will therefore be adding conditions to our license agreements to prevent this kind of thing in the future.
Unanticipated? Hardly. But it’s a cautionary tale of how our data gets produced and used–even when we’re unaware of it.
Apr 21st, 2011 by Branden Kornell
Somerville, Massachusetts: How could you do this to me?
Somerville, home of the first American flag, birthplace of Marshmallow Fluff, one-time crash pad of Barack Obama, sent me a laughably bad pie chart the other day. It came in my yearly Environmental Services mailing:
See it yet? The wedges add up to 78%.
Tags: bad charts, charts, environment, pie charts
Apr 13th, 2011 by Branden Kornell
There are only two reason a website asks questions on a sign-up form:
Wouldn’t it be nice to know which they’re doing, and when?
Apr 6th, 2011 by Nathan Wenzel
I pointed out my bank’s lack of data savvy once before . I would love it if they could be helpful, but I’m forced to wonder: Is my bank trying but failing to be helpful? Or are they just pretending to be helpful, but really hoping to charge me an overdraft fee?
Tags: bank, personal finance
Mar 30th, 2011 by Branden Kornell
I recently renewed my subscription to Runner’s World magazine. Rodale (the publisher) sent me a welcome letter with my free gift (a running journal) and a “Prepaid $500 Gift Card” to a company called RedStar Worldwear that sells sunglasses.
That’s gotta be a scam, right?
Not really. The company is legit, as far as I can tell. But the $500 figure is a red herring.
Tags: anchoring, free offers, shopping
Mar 22nd, 2011 by Branden Kornell
I’m a big fan of Tableau Public, a website that offers free, first-class charting and mapping tools. People have used it to visualize everything from Major League Baseball statistics to the history of Japanese earthquakes. Unfortunately, I haven’t been a fan of some of Tableau’s recent actions.
In December, Tableau yanked a visualization by James Ball on the contents of the Wikileaks cables. Frankly, I was disgusted. As I mentioned in this post, the viz didn’t contain the cables themselves. It allowed the user to explore the subjects that the cables covered. Ball was reporting on metadata, helping readers understand the context of the controversy.
By all accounts, Tableau hadn’t been directly asked by the U.S. government to take the visualization down; they apparently did so in a knee-jerk reaction to the political climate. At the time, they offered a weak justification that the creator did not have the legal right to make the data available.
The action angered a lot of people in the business intelligence community, including members of Tableau’s staff. Now, three months later, Tableau is taking steps to right that wrong.
Mar 16th, 2011 by Patrik Outericky
With gas prices soaring (again), most people are becoming more conscious of fuel efficiency (again). The last time gas prices went through the roof, most people learned that driving large SUV’s and trucks with a single passenger is probably not a good idea. Hopefully they have since moved on to a more efficient vehicle. I know I did. Though my last one wasn’t that bad (2000 Honda Accord). My Honda FIT is a great little commuter car and it has, what is pretty common in newer cars now, a fuel efficiency gauge on the dashboard.
Tags: driving, efficiency, mpg
Mar 11th, 2011 by Branden Kornell
As a kid, I played a lot of Nintendo games. And I did something freakish whenever I bought a new game: I ripped open the box, but before putting the game in, I read through the instruction manual cover to cover.
Normal human beings don’t do this.
Normal human beings pop in the game cartridge and figure it out as they go along. Sometime between the 1980′s and today, game designers wised up and worked the instructions into the game.
You should use the exact same approach for any interface you design, including dashboards and website interfaces.
Feb 28th, 2011 by Nathan Wenzel
Quicken just has too many options that require way too much time to figure out and even more time to maintain. So, after figuring out why I use Quicken, I set about figuring out how to set up Quicken to be my personal financial dashboard.
First, here are my three rules for using Quicken:
1) If it takes a lot of time to set up, I’m out.
2) If it takes any time to maintain, I’m out.
3) If it requires reading a 632 page manual, I’m definitely out.
Tags: finance, personal bi