Title: slide:ology (First Edition)
Author: Nancy Duarte
Publisher: O’Reilly
Date: September 2008
ISBN: 978-0-596-52234-6

I’ve sat through my share of presentations, and what goes through my mind all to often is “If these smart dudes can foul it up this badly, what hope do I have when presenting is unavoidable?” At those moments I pray for something to inspire and help me.

This book seems to be it. slide:ology lays it out in black and white:

Making bad slides is easy, and it will negatively impact your career. Invest in your slides, but invest in your own visual skills as well. The alternative is to inadvertently commit career suislide.

If you want a set of strategies and tactics to help you produce a better presentation, this is a really great book. It gives you tools to think about what an audience is looking for, and how you can effectively tell an engaging story to them. One of the core pieces of advice is:

Treat Your Audience as King

Aesthetically the book is big enough to promise lots of goodies, yet it is not intimidating. The book is visually light, airy, colourful, lavishly illustrated, and thoughtfully laid out. There are bold red pages between the chapters so it is very easy to flip through and find the right place. The pages containing content are laid out informally and effectively with considered use of colour and whitespace. As you read through the book you see that this is no accident, the book effectively uses some of the visual design principles it is describing.

If you choose to read the book from cover to cover then content unfolds logically. Should you later use the book as a reference then the sections stand by themselves. This could be the result of the author thinking carefully about the ways readers might approach the book, and how to make slide:ology useful to them.

Although the book was light and airy to look at, it is not light on ideas. slide:ology effectively uses and explains many of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few’s ideas when it comes to displaying quantitative data and diagrams.

Thinking Like a Designer and the chapters which followed have helped me start thinking more like a designer:

Every decision a designer makes is intentional. Reason and logic underpin the placement of visual elements. Meaning underscores the order and hierarchy of ideas

The chapters which address various aspects of design are full of useful principles, specific examples of “before” and “after” slides, and things as mundane as the RGB triples for some of the palettes used as illustrations. This “help in depth” eases me into trying things out. The specific examples are presented in the context of more general principles, and there is plenty of variety in the examples.

slide:ology breaks things down into small enough chunks so that I can make progress on them. The individual elements are manageable and I have no excuse to avoid raising my quality bar.

I found it refreshing that someone was prepared to give a rough estimate of how long it can take to produce a presentation, and break it down into activities. Despite my hopes that Keynote would just do it for me, it seems that good presentations are the end result of planning, hard work, reworks, and rehearsal. The presentation tool has to be used the right way. It is no substitute for good ideas and hard work.

At a more visceral level I liked the book because I have been having fun slyly practicing drawing stick figures at the office, re-awakening a sense of fun in visual expression. One last goody: I always enjoy digging through the bibliography or further reading sections of books I find useful. There are plenty of interesting books mentioned throughout the text and in the reference section of slide:ology.

Conclusion:

I found slide:ology an engaging and interesting book. It has shown me ways I can prepare and produce better presentations. These tools also give me a way to critically appreciate presentations I see.

There’s something deeply satisfying in knowing that I can improve my presentations, and many of the techniques and principles can be used in the commission of web pages and user interfaces.

In contrast to the usual cloud of resignation and despair which usually settles I think I can be optimistic and energised when preparing my next presentation.

Mike Stok – November 2008

Title: Information Dashboard Design
Author: Stephen Few
Publisher: O’Reilly
Date: January 2006
ISBN-10: 0-596-100160-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-596-10016-2

The reason I wanted to get a copy of this book to review was that I was hugely frustrated by the volume of data I had to scan for patterns at a previous job. ?Now I have moved on I have had time to revisit the book and do a better review.

Description:

Information Dashboard Design is a book which can educate the reader so that they can design more effective information dashboards. ?The book defines a dashboard thus:

A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives which fits entirely on a single computer screen so it can be monitored at a glance.

In about two hundred large, uncluttered, and well illustrated pages Stephen Few takes the reader through: A historical survey to help define dashboards and put them in context, thirteen commonly made mistakes, a quick overview of human visual perception, mixing simplicity and effective media to make a usable dashboard, and then some case studies to tie it all together with real examples.

What’s to like?

The book appeals to me in its large format with uncluttered pages. ?By the time I reached the end of the book I appreciated that Stephen had used many of his techniques for simplifying and removing clutter information dashboards to make the book more effective. ?As a result the book struck me as almost a coffee table book, beautiful enough just to leaf through for its own sake.

The pacing of the presentation meant that there was enough mental space for me to digest the points being made.

The structure is logical and flows well, Stephen’s notion of effective presentation of data pretty much coincides with Edward Tufte’s (a good thing, in my opinion), and the examples are relevant and useful. ?I particularly liked the critiques of designs which could be improved – many times I have had the intuition that a dashboard is not so good, and the criticism of the example dashboards helped me understand why they were not as good as they could be.

The coverage of human perception was interesting to me (even though I have a red/green colour blind brother I had never considered what he might miss in a dashboard using traffic light style colours), and this overview gave an underpinning to the design of some media which could be read at a glance even though they were information dense.

The final set of examples pulled all of the advice together, and it was a delight to compare and contrast the “good” dashboards at the end of the book with the “bad” examples presented earlier. ?As each of the final examples had a different prospective user I could see how the advice and guidance can be used for different users, and that they met the author’s criteria for well designed dashboards:

Well-designed dashboards deliver information that is:

• Exceptionally well organized
• Condensed, primarily in the form of summaries and exceptions
• Specific to and customized for the dashboard’s audience and objectives
• Displayed using concise and often small media that communicate the data and its message in the clearest and most direct way possible

What’s not to like?

Overall I liked the book, and only occasionally did the tone seem to become a little “distant”. ?I would have liked more examples, and I suspect that that’s more my laziness than the author’s oversight.

Conclusion

I liked the book, and I think that it will be useful for me many times in the future. ?The techniques used to distill and condense data for use in dashboards are useful in many other contexts, and the information about perception has got me thinking about all sorts of other places where I can use our perceptual mechanisms to make users’ lives easier.

The book is useful if you are designing dashboards for others, or even generating email reports for yourself which need an overview section which can be interpreted at a glance.

Author’s web site: www.perceptualedge.com

Mike Stok – October 2008