I had a good chat with one of the attendees from the Audit Commission at the annual LARIA Conference last week. They told me about a report they have recently produced called 'In the Know - Using information to make better decisions: a discussion paper'
As part of this discussion she asked me about work that I was aware of in relation to good practice for presenting data and statistics - in particular performance data commonly in the form of Performance Indicators (or PIs).
Here's an extract of my response to her which I hope is of general interest:
Regarding the presentation of stats/data - some useful links including seminars that I have been involved in:
http://www.creatingexcellence.org.uk/regeneration-renewal-article190-p1.html
http://www.wmro.org/standardTemplate.aspx/Home/RDIN/RDINEvents/PresentingStatistics
http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/ (Stephen Few's blog) - you'll see we have borrowed his concept of 'bullet graphs' which are used in our Performance Profile template at http://www.instantatlas.com/downloads/IAperformanceprofile.pdf
There's lots of other data visualisation links on our web site at http://www.instantatlas.com/supportlinks.xhtml
We are working with our customers on best practice for presenting their performance data. I haven't seen many good examples of government doing this well. This includes outputs generated from specialist Performance Management Systems. Many appear to rely heavily on static HTML/PDF 'briefing books' which are suitable as a published snapshot for specific audiences but centainly not ideal for 'lay-users'.
In my experience many sites that are supposedly aimed at presenting this type of data to a lay audience suffer from being driven too strongly by technical software enthusiasts. Specifications are often rigid and drawn up by consultation with a wide array of stakeholders (hence endless items of end user functionality). In reality they should be driven by people who have the best understanding of user needs (and 'user thinking' in Tufte terminology) and people who know about the data. Unsurprisingly, the resulting applications offer far too much functional complexity and focus little attention on what they are trying to communicate and how users will use it. This is a widespread problem across the public sector.
While there are things you can be critical of I do think Derbyshire County Council have done some nice things for presenting their area profiles (that could be applied to performance outcomes) at:
http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/community/about_your_county/community_profiles/default.asp
Hope that's useful.
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