What do you think of when I say, “qualitative data visualization?” Do you just pull up a picture of a word cloud in your head, or does something else come to mind? For years I would just say that good qualitative data visualization is really just illustration. But you could say the same thing about […]
How to Create a Simple Slidedoc Template in Canva
Slidedocs are an incredibly useful reporting format for sharing your work with all sorts of audiences, from executive leadership to your peers and the public. In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to create your own simple but effective slidedoc template in Canva, starting from scratch. Prefer to read instead of watch? Here’s the whole […]
The Survey Says…
My ADHD break can be a jerk sometimes. On the upside, it gives me a million things I can do. That’s also the downside, because faced with too much stuff my ability to do anything goes down to zero. So I sent a survey to my email list. What the survey asked. In the survey […]
Stop Searching for a Happy Medium
In my last post I made the claim that you should write the nerd report. After that, you can break it down for other people. So that suggests there are two types of reports, nerd reports & other people reports. But in practice, I think we really see four. Two useful types (nerd reports & […]
Write the Nerd Report
Did you know that I have nerd version of my Theory of Use post? It’s a 9,000+ word working paper filled with lots of citations and a bunch of technical gobbledegook. I did a readability check on it and it’s definitely college level (if not post-grad). I have not shared it with anyone. I am […]
Broken Resource Theory
So I’m an information designer with a quantitative background who doesn’t care that much about charts and graphs. I used to to care a lot, and you will find some guidance on this site about chart design (this blog has been going since 2010 which is over half of my professional career). But over time […]
Theory of Use
Never before in history have we had so many tools and channels we could use to deliver research and evaluation insights directly to people who could actually use them. And yet, most organizations still rely on outdated and ineffective dissemination strategies. Now it’s easy to bash the organizations, but the truth is that our research […]
4 Lessons from a Viral Chart
Have you ever heard of social objects? I talk about them every once in while here, but probably not enough given how important I think they are in the spread of information. Social objects are anchors for conversation. They can be ideas, concepts, stories, physical objects, or anything else we can talk about. My cartoons […]
Evaluation is a dangerous profession.
Evaluation is a dangerous profession. Not dangerous as in it requires hard hats or tethers. But dangerous in that it questions realities most would rather ignore. Traditions that are so deeply entrenched within organizational structures that merely hinting at their instability can lead to alienation and professional isolation. Our frameworks and methods exist not only […]
Report Review: 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment – Wake County, NC
Today’s report review took me a strange direction. What started as a simple report review ended up becoming a full working paper, but more on that shortly. This post is in two parts: In the US if a hospital wants to be tax exempt it has do a few things to meet IRS requirements. One […]