Tag Archives: visual communication

Visual Management with Brown M&Ms

Posted on August 15, 2011 by John Hunter

When you hear about rock musicians having a clause in their contract that they must have a bowl of M&Ms in their dressing room with all the brown M&Ms removed you could be excused for thinking: what will these crazy celebrities do next. Well it might just be those crazy celebrities are using visual management (granted I think there could be better methods [a bit more mistake proofing where the real problems would be manifest] but it is an interesting … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Communicating with the Visual Display of Data

Posted on October 26, 2009 by John Hunter

Anscombe’s quartet: all four sets are identical when examined statistically, but vary considerably when graphed. Image via Wikipedia. ___________________ Anscombe’s quartet comprises four datasets that have identical simple statistical properties, yet are revealed to be very different when inspected graphically. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician F.J. Anscombe to demonstrate the importance of graphing data before analyzing it, and of the effect of outliers on the statistical properties of a dataset. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Quality tools, Statistics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Data Visualization

Posted on August 30, 2007 by John Hunter

Data is often displayed poorly, making it difficult to see what is important. When data is displayed well the important facts should leap off the page and into the viewers mind. Edward Tufte is an expert on this topic with great books. If you have not read them, you should: Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. Smashing magazine has some nice examples of good display techniques in Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. I don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Creativity, Data, IT, Management, Psychology | Tagged , , ,

Visual Instructions Example

Posted on July 4, 2007 by John Hunter

How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what to do (and even includes a time stamp showing how long into the process you are – which shows you the total time it will take at one simple glance 1 minute and 36 seconds). Such instructions are a great … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Data Visualization Example

Posted on March 28, 2007 by John Hunter

[I replaced the embedded video, since Google broke the original link with the way they shut down Google Video after buying YouTube] In Myths About the Developing World, Hans Rosling shows some great graphics to display data on health care outcomes. This is one of the talks from the great TED conference that we have mentioned before. They really have some great webcasts available on their site. The presentation also gives a concrete example of faulty knowledge (people thinking things … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Economics, Health care, Management, webcast | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Health Care Pictographs

Posted on August 2, 2006 by John Hunter

New pharmaceutical pictograms The Risk/Benefit Assessment of Drugs-Analysis and Response (RAD-AR [the broken link was removed]) Council of Japan has released a new batch of pictograms for use on pharmaceutical packaging. No more deciphering complicated dosage directions and warnings — a glance is all it takes now. See all the pictographs [the broken link was removed] I don’t understand all the pictographs. If these are helpful in Japan, (assuming others in the USA see it the way I do) it … Continue reading →

Posted in Health care | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Visible Data

Posted on February 18, 2006 by John Hunter

Effective visual signals are important for effective management improvement: lean thinking emphasizes such ideas. Top 5 Rules of Effective Measurement Boards is an excellent post on how to make measurement effective. Take the time to find the important measures and then don’t keep data hidden in some drawer or computer file out of people’s view and therefore out of mind. Post the important data for everyone to see. Review the data as changes are made and see that the changes … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Visual Work Instructions

Posted on December 17, 2005 by John Hunter

Via Got Boondoggle? Shorter Text for Visual Work Instructions (link broken 🙁 so removed) by Steven Blackwell: The line worker may not even read text that seems excessive. We have spent the last eight years observing line workers using visual work instructions and asking them if they read the text. If the text is a short sentence, the answer is usually “yes.” If the text is more than one sentence long, the answer is usually “no.” Another recent post, Poka-Yoke … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools, quote | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments