[Sigia-l] Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs. Don Norman

[Livia Labate]

quoting Don Norman himself, "I respectfully submit that all of this is 
nonsense"

 > the slides are written for the benefit of the speaker.

I wouldn't make that assumption. I am sure others will agree with 
Norman, but to me, slides will have key elements of the talk and provide 
a bridge between what people are viewing and what they are listening to. 
If that helps the speaker, great, but I'd expect the speaker to be able 
to give the talk looking at the audience, not the slides - if he really 
knows what he's talking about.

 > This is one of the points Tufte has continually failed to grasp,
 > not only in his diatribe against PowerPoint, but in almost all of
 > his publications and talks. Tufte is a statistician and I suspect
 > that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart
 > which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal
 > yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous
 > outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable
 > chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a
 > lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens
 >  within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is
 > lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is
 > off on some other topic.

I think Norman and Tufte need to get together for a coffee because 
Norman is definitely missing Tufte's point. Yes, the man loves a chart, 
but when he talks about how to give a talk, he's saying precisely the 
same thing: make it compelling, deliver the results before you start so 
the end doesn't come as a surprise and people can follow the talk to 
understand how you get to the result, make the presentation show the 
high-level ideas that bridge the minutiae of what is being said, etc.

And yes, a chart sometimes is all you need. You don't need to have 15 
slides with bullet points when you can summarize your concept into a 
single, concise visual representation. THAT's why Powerpoint sucks. It's 
hard enough to have the objectivity to summarize your ideas into 
cohesive points that are easy to communicate, but doing that with a tool 
that doesn't support that activity in any way (but instead gives you 
templates/tools that reinforce a models that don't work) is crazy hard. 
And far too easy to make mistakes with.

 > let me review Tufte's complaint about the presentation of data
 > during the NASA Columbia incident [...]
 > it was a bad slide, but that isn't where the error lay.
 > The error was in the conclusion reached by the experts.

Not true. The engineers knew what the problem was, they realized they 
were basing their decisions on a hypothetical model that was vastly 
different from the reality. They knew their model couldn't predict if 
there would be a crash or not.

That's what that single slide says. But the slide doesn't have a 
conclusion saying "so, because we used this model we can't really tell 
if things will work. Don't make a decision based on our model". That 
slide IS the problem because people made a decision based on pieces of 
DATA jotted together, not on INFORMATION.

So the error lays in the way the experts communicated their conclusions, 
not the conclusions themselves. And the fault is theirs for not being 
objective, concise, specific and clear. And for relying on Powerpoint as 
the structural model to put all this together.

 > at the time, the experts were the best source of
 > information available

Precisely, but they never extended that knowledge to the decision 
makers, because they never communicated "we used the wrong model to 
measure so it really doesn't apply to make this decision". Omission is 
as problematic as giving the wrong advice. As the crash shows.

 > What would Tufte have speakers present to audiences?
 > Overload, that's what. He critiques talk guidelines that stress
 > that one should minimize material on any slide by showing a table
 > from a 1662 analysis of deaths in London, pointing out that this
 > one page contains 1,855 data points. He wants this in a talk?

Know your audience and use appropriate visualization tools, that's what 
Tufte says. He doesn't say "minimize" (that was one of the problem with 
the NASA presentation!) or "maximize", but contextualize.

 > Is PowerPoint bad? No, in fact, it is quite a useful tool.
 > Boring talks are bad. Poorly structured talks are bad. Don't blame
 > the problem on the tool.

Be content with crappy tools? No thanks. I use PowerPoint for some 
presentations, the ones where PowerPoint structure allows me to convey 
the meaning I want to convey. But Powerpoint still doesn't support most 
of the things I want to communicate, so it's not the tool for me in most 
cases. I am sure there are people who think it's great. They either make 
sucky slides or they really have to present things that demand that 
structure. If I had to guess I'd say the later is a minority.