The Early Years, Authorship, and Raising the 'Graphicacy' Bar: A Conversation with Steve Wexler

This conversation took place in January 2020 at the famous Downtown, El-Charro restaurant in Tucson, AZ. The above picture was originally taken by Val Canez, and appeared in the Tucson Citizen in 2006.

CF: I was in Austin at Tableau Conference 2016 and attended your session on survey data visualization and it was one of my favorite sessions of the conference. It was clear you had both a deep expertise in the area and a passion for the subject. How did you get started in that space?

SW: Well, I’ve had a bit of a weird career.

CF: I’d love to hear about it.

SW: I started off as a musician. My education was in music, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. After graduating, I went to New York to ply my trade and realized pretty quickly that I was going to need to supplement my income to make things work, so I started doing stuff with computers. Over the course of the early part of my career my work in that space continued to grow to the point where music became more of a hobby than a necessary means of income. I eventually founded a software company called WexTech and I ran it for 20 years. We developed two software products that are still around (Doc-To-Help and AnswerWorks). After I sold off the assets of WexTech I founded a startup, but I wasn’t able to procure funding to keep it going, so here I was in my late 40s (I was 47) looking for a job.

Some former colleagues I’ve mine worked for a company called the eLearning Guild, and they had a job opening for a Director of Research. When I interviewed, I proposed the idea, ‘here you have thousands of people that you can poll, instead of coming in with static reports, why not use an interactive dashboard? That way you can easily see, for example what people in education might think, what people in government might think, and what people in any other industry might think.’ It sounds intuitive now, but back then, it was a bit revolutionary.

And they said, ‘it sounds great, do we need to create our own software, or where do we find such a tool? And I said, there’s an amazing tool that will be perfect for the job and it’s called …

…Spotfire.

I hadn’t even heard of Tableau at that point. Long story short, I ended up getting the job, and was immediately tasked with exploring all the other tools that might suit the need, and that’s when I discovered Tableau, and I immediately fell in love with it.

I was in that role for a couple of years, all the while getting more and more involved in learning and developing with Tableau when I got a job offer from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, formerly known as the Human Resource Institute; and the Human Resource Institute it just so happened, was founded by Rensis Likert, the inventor of the Likert scale. Anyway, I was there for a few years and then I got laid off, and again found myself looking for a job.

It’s at that point that I decided to simply start a blog and share with the world what I had learned over the prior several years visualizing survey data with Tableau, and essentially, that’s how Data Revelations was born.

3-4 months later Elisa Fink, the former CMO of Tableau reached out to me and recommended me for my first gig, which was visualizing survey data for Time Warner Cable. And it was tough. I mean really tough.

CF: Like ‘Check all that Apply’ questions tough?

SW: <Laughs> Like multiple conditional dependencies, with constraints that needed to be applied based on certain responses. It was something I had never done before. I remember, really struggling for a while, and realizing…I don’t know how to do this, and that’s when I simply reached out to the community on the forums, and within a few hours, this guy named Richard Leeke, who was one of the original Tableau Zen Masters, came back to me with the solution, which by the way, I’ve blogged about, and have had to use a few times since then. But that’s when I realized, here I was, my first gig; and I was stuck. That’s when I realized how amazing the Tableau community was. It came through for me in a big way, when I needed it the most, and I’ll never forget that.

So, I get the first gig. I’m blogging. I’m entering data visualization competitions, and I’m winning them, and one of those was the Strata O’Reilly competition, which at that point was a feeder for the Tableau IronViz competition. So this was 2011; I win the Strata contest, and I then end up winning the first-ever IronViz contest at the Tableau Conference.

CF: I started using Tableau back in 2013, and I believe that was version 8, what version were you working with for those contests back in 2011?

SW: It was version 6 and version 7 was in beta, and version 6 was a HUGE release because they opened up table calculations. Before it was pretty much a black box, but with version 6 you were finally able to ‘see under the hood’ at what these table calcs we’re doing, and it was immensely helpful. Now in terms of dashboard formatting, you didn’t even have containers. It was tiles. Containers came in 7, and floating elements didn’t come until version 8.

CF: Wow, interesting! I think they should have kiosks at the Tableau conferences where they allow people to play with some of these older versions…2,3,4,5, etc. It would be fun and give a sense of the immense innovation that has taken place over the years.

SW: They do that! Or at least they used to. I think they should actually have a competition with older versions, it would be like in tennis, having a match with wooden rackets.

CF: Okay, so you get your first gig, Data Revelations is up and going, the flywheel is starting to turn at this point, right?

SW: Yeah, it really was. I ended up writing a survey data white paper for Tableau. I was Tableau’s first training partner, which simply meant I was the first person to teach Tableau that was not actually an employee of Tableau, and in the second year of all of that, I ended up being named a Zen Master.

CF: So you got your start with survey data, and formed a practice around it, is that still a primary part of your business?

SW: No, it’s mainly focused on workshops, public and private based on the content in The Big Book of Dashboards. I still write about survey data, and I still consult on it, but really my passion at this point is improving the data literacy at an individual and organizational level, and improving the ‘graphicacy’, or the graphic fluency of an organization. That’s where I’m heading. It’s worth mentioning, that there are already individuals and groups doing tremendous work in this area, Ben Jones being just one of them. If you haven’t been to his website dataliteracy.com, I highly recommend you check it out.

The Big Book of Dashboards was primarily geared towards the individual tasked with building the stuff, and a lot of my future energies will be spent in raising the ‘graphicacy’ bar on a broader scale throughout the corporation.

CF: Very Cool. Let’s talk about The Big Book of Dashboards real quick. You’re doing the survey data thing, you have a nice niche carved out there, and from that, somehow comes this 400+ page book on dashboarding best practices. tell me how that came about?

SW: It came from teaching Tableau classes, and from work I was doing with one particular client, who was doing these massive balanced scorecards; red, yellow, and green type stuff. I ended up writing a white paper based on that experience, outlining all the things that they would be able to see if they implemented some of these best practices. So, through those things, it occurred to me that there wasn’t this book that matched predicament with possibilities based on best practices, and I knew that I wanted to do it, and I knew that I didn’t want to do it alone.

CF: That was my next question. It’s hard enough to write alone, but writing with a group can add all sorts of other complexities. How did the book become a collaboration, and how did Jeff and Andy come to be involved?

SW: The first person I actually tapped to write with me was Kelly Martin.

CF: Really?

SW: Kelly was a fellow Zen Master, we were both inaugurated in the second cohort, and she really changed the way people perceived the business dashboard. She was an excellent designer, but more than that she was a really savvy analyst. She understood best practices, how people interact most efficiently with information. So I asked her, and then we agreed we needed a third, so I asked Jeff Shaffer.

CF: I never met Kelly, but I always thought her work was fantastic. The Bird Strikes Dashboard was amazing.

SW: Agreed. Kelly, however at that point was pretty busy with her own consulting practice, and eventually had to bow out, as the commitment was just too much to balance with her own practice. Jeff then recommended Andy Cotgreave, and at first he respectfully declined. It took some persistence with Andy, and he eventually came on board.

CF: So which one of you three can take credit for the Screaming Cat?

SW: I’m taking credit for that one. I knew we needed to have something in the book that made it really clear to everyone reading the book … ‘DON’T DO THIS!’

Have you ever read the comic book Bloom County?

There was this character named Bill the Cat, and he was this really disgusting cat character that ultimately served as the inspiration behind the icon you see in the book.

CF: Awesome … well whenever I see an unnecessarily colorful dashboard, or hard to interpret dashboard, I now think Screaming Cat … so mission accomplished.

Its been a few years now since the BBOD was released, does the future hold additional books for you?

SW: Actually yeah. The working title is ‘What Every Business Person Should Know about Data Visualization’. This one is much more to try to lift the data visualization literacy and the ‘graphicacy’ of an organization so that everybody in the organization has the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what makes a good data visualization. It won’t be nearly as long, but it really is intended to make accessible and accepted a lot of the things I’ll be presenting over the next couple of days.

CF: Okay, last question. You’ve been in the data visualization game a long time..what are some of the things you see on the horizon that are potential game-changers?

SW: Well, there’s a lot there, but perhaps a good place to start is just a few months back. When I first saw the announcement of the alpha for Tableau was going to include transition effects, and animations, I thought to myself, this is going to be gigantic, and it is!

There’s a couple things I’m thinking about there. The first is that whenever a filter or parameter selection is made, that chart will change, and that motion will be another incredible tool to facilitate understanding. The second, is the Hans Rosling, Gapminder, type of visualization and the ability to see how this data changes over time, and that functionality has been around for awhile in Tableau, just never on the server side, but it will be now.

We’re going to see some people do some incredible things with animations, and we’re also going to see some pretty bad things in my opinion.

CF: Such as?

SW: Think of animated bullet points in Powerpoint, where each bullet can move and transition in a way that doesn’t really add anything to the information being conveyed. It’s simply a means to attempt to keep the audiences attention or do something simply because it can be done. Having said that, I’d rather have dynamite, than not have dynamite, and Viz Animations are dynamite! They will be another visual encoding tool where best practices will have to be established and employed, and the community will ensure that happens over time.