In my job, I'm often asked about the "Sex" factor of business data visualizations. Recent advancements in rich-client technology (Flex, Silverlight, AJAX techniques) enable some interesting interactivity and animation, and are widely adopted in many popular "Web 2.0" websites most of us visit every day.
Web 2.0 techniques have been slow to take off in the corporate world, in part due to the lag time of business software vendors in delivering applications and tools that enable these advanced visualizations. Furthermore, implementation by some prevalent business software vendors is often flawed. Many examples are noted on Stephen Few's blog at Perceptual Edge.
Animation by itself does will not add value to business data on a corporate dashboard. But it will enhance the user experience in some cases. For example, look at the following bar chart examples from ManyEyes, an excellent website for experimental visualizations:
Notice how the first example allows the user to click a category and receive instant feedback on it's comparison to the previously selected category. Seeing the bars moving up or down is an excellent tool for relative comparison. This is superior to using a stacked bar, which can quickly make axis labels unwieldy and difficult to interpret when several categories must be included.
The second example has similar animation, but note that when you choose a different category, the values on the y axis change. While the movement gives the perception of an increase or decrease, the change in context makes that change irrelevant to the new data visualized.
The consistent theme here is that instantaneous feedback keeps the user engaged, and allows us to maintain our train of thought as we ask the next question from our data. Since I work with large corporations with massive amounts of data, condensing that data into accurate summaries for analysis is an essential art form which is its own topic altogether.
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