Simple is Good: Observations of Visualization Use Amongst the Big Data Digerati

Abstract

While modern information visualization (IV) has been around for several decades, the inventions of IV seem to be peripheral to the everyday work in companies that would seem to be the most likely to use these inventions. In this case study, Google uses very few IV tools, relying mostly on more traditional ways of looking at data and data relationships. What has brought about this state of affairs? An analysis shows that the basic causes of low adoption are (a) difficulty of data wrangling and sharing the work products of analysis, (b) the need to share a common visual language literacy across different parts of the organization, (c) problems in using IV tools to communicate and present complex data analyses. At the same time, IV technology is found to be more useful in the investigation phase of research, rather than for communication and presentation reasons.