Three Simple Rules for Building Data Products that People Will Actually Use – Tim Trefren (highscalability.com)

Expanding beyond Tim’s great article, with a little of my own life experience: one of the main functions of my job is to communicate stories through data. Learning this new form of communication has been a challenge as I am naturally inclined to want to delve into the complicated data. Having to work with many professionals who would rather eat dirt than do math has shown me that you have to build the story using simple graphics and meaningful numbers. The key here is to keep things simple which much harder than it looks. As Mark Twain says “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” To have truly revolutionary products, the data has to be presented simply.

Many companies now have begun to offer data analysis as their flagship product or main feature. Applications such as Salesforce and Tableau aggregate data and produce output that is both sophisticated in structure and simple to understand. These are used by people who couldn’t tell you what a query or a database was. Keep it simple, make it pretty.