Edward R. Tufte, dubbed “the da Vinci of data,” by The New York Times, is best known for his books about the ways we communicate data and information visually. A professor emeritus at Yale University, Tufte took the time to speak with us about how best to present information and how companies can differentiate themselves by not doing “the stupid things every other company does.” Below are excerpts.
On the (very bad) design of corporate Web sites:
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That's great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company's values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, The New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don't do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That's flabby design for flabby content.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they're imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It's silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
On living in a PowerPoint world:
In an authoritarian institution, such as a corporation, there's nothing like an order from on high saying, “From now on, we're not using PowerPoint.” That will do it. People will work out something. Or a company can specify, “From now on, your presentation software is Word, not PowerPoint.” Of course, you shouldn't be using proprietary formats at all. As Eric Gill said, “If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.” Those three words -- truth, goodness, beauty -- you'd never find them in a corporate design manual or a PowerPoint.
In business you get lots of advice from executives and councils, but you never know whether a statement's true or not. Somehow there's a sort of softness to the presentation. The cutting edge of data displays is not in business; it's in real science. If you want to see the best graphics and displays around, you go to Science or Nature, the rock-star journals in science. Every week they're full of real scientists with huge amounts of data, plenty of brain power and research resources, and they want to tell the world about their findings.
Financial people have a similar resource base. They're smart, they've got huge amounts of data. And yet they're operating at intellectual resolution and visual resolution at 5% or 10% of real science.
Why? Because there's such confusion in the financial world between analytic displays and pitch displays. In the scientific world, evidence is evidence. Certainly scientists emphasize their findings, but there are checkups on evidence and checkups on truth and the database is often public. That's not true in the financial world. The graphical displays in the business world look like second-rate social science or third-rate marketing displays.
On the deceptions of simplicity:
The urge to simplify is tough-guy posturing. “Just tell me one thing.” Executives are busy, they've got a lot more things to do than just listen to you that day, but they are not stupid. If they're stupid, how come you're reporting to them? How come you're having to pitch to them?
You need informational depth. When people are presenting to you, you need to figure out what their story is, but you also need to decide whether you can believe them. Are they competent? Are they smart? Are they lying? You've got to make ethical judgments about their intelligence and their ethics. That comes in part from looking at how they think about a rich body of information. Detail helps credibility.
When someone says, “Just give me the highlights,” what they really mean is, “I have no sense of what's relevant. I'm not willing to probe. I don't have any time to think seriously about this problem.” But detail offers the impatient something wonderful: When you're focused on data, not pitching, the meeting will be shorter. It'll be more intense and you'll have to work harder, but you'll learn a lot more and you have a chance at making smarter decisions.
This article is adapted from “How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them),” by Edward R. Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman, which appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. The complete article is available at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/.