Steve Krause writes in Analytics That Explain Themselves about a feature available on Scottrade that takes some of the complex analytical tools used in stock trading and provides plain English explanations of what they mean. This gets me to thinking about how this feature could be developed for the data mart project that I’m working on.
One thing I notice immediately about the Scottrade explanations is that they focus on a single stock, rather than comparing stocks or providing data about whole industries. I think this focus makes it a little bit easier to describe in plain English what the visualization represents. If instead we had a visualization that compared the performance of several stocks, an explanation that interpreted the relationships between the stocks would be necessarily more complex and perhaps more nuanced.
Still, writing some standard guidance for the reader to interpret what they see in a report or chart is a good idea. Even just a common style for writing footnotes to reports would help report consumers to become habituated to reading and understanding guidance on interpretation. It would be fantastic to automate this like Scottrade does.
