Now You See It

Before you can present information to others, you must understand its story. Now You See It teaches the concepts, principles, and practices of visual data sensemaking. The skills taught in this book rely primarily on something that most of us possess—vision—interactively using graphs to find and examine the meaningful patterns and relationships that reside in quantitative data. Although some questions about quantitative data can only be answered using sophisticated statistical techniques, most can be answered using relatively simple visual data sensemaking skills. Until Now You See It was published, no book taught these basic skills comprehensively and in a way that was accessible to a broad audience. Even though these skills can be developed by anyone with eyes to see, they are not intuitive—they must be learned. Without these skills, even the best data visualization tools are of little use, and data will remain nothing but noise. This second edition of Now You See It hones the content of the first and adds to it the content of another book by the author, Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise, which was originally written as an extension of Now You See It into slightly more advanced data sensemaking techniques, including Statistical Process Control (SPC). In other words, two books have been consolidated into one to make the process of learning visual data sensemaking skills more fluid, efficient, and complete.

Stephen Few, a longtime information professional, is best known for his contributions to the field of data visualization. Since founding his consultancy Perceptual Edge in 2003, he has written six books. Above all else, Stephen is a teacher. He believes that deriving value from data to support better decisions and actions is highly skilled work. Helping people develop these skills is his passion.