Category: Visualization

Making the subway more readable

charlescearl on March 3, 2018

Heading back from New York City last weekend I was amazed to see an updated station stop display (graph) on the E train to JFK. I don’t have a video, but you can see the how it updates the destinations (I didn’t notice eta) below — a list of next stops shifts to the right:

But wait, something is off!

My colleague Boris Gorelik had posted a piece entitled How to make a graph less readable? Rotate the text labels arguing that rotation of the axis labels imposes a processing cost on the reader. Keep the text aligned. Wouldn’t moving the destination labels up and down as Boris suggests save the jostled E train rider precious milliseconds?

Atlanta Data Science Visualization

Call (and email and chat) early and often!

charlescearl on February 11, 2018

If you’re in sales, it pays to call (and email, and chat) early and often. This intuitive insight comes from a recent study, “Research on 200 Million Sales Interactions Cracks the Code on Cadences” published by Atlanta startup SalesLoft. This data was shared with me by Butler Raines, SalesLoft’s Head of Product — a dear friend, beautiful human being, and a new-school bitter southerner.

I found the piece illuminating, not only for the nicely presented graphs of customer/sales interactions, but also for the exposition on sales terminology (I learned what a cadence is).

Does SalesLoft have other insights they’d like to share? Many data scientists would like to know!