{"id":7165,"date":"2021-09-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvsnightingstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=7165"},"modified":"2021-10-26T08:57:46","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T12:57:46","slug":"dataviz-horror-stories-shirley-wu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nightingaledvs.com\/dataviz-horror-stories-shirley-wu\/","title":{"rendered":"Dataviz Horror Stories: Shirley Wu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake in a data visualization? Did you utterly fail to meet your client\u2019s or boss\u2019s vision? Did you proudly share a visualization only to be overwhelmed by critical feedback? Of course you have! We all have, whether we\u2019re beginners or superstars. In this series, we\u2019re encouraging dataviz practitioners to share their own Horror Stories as a way of normalizing \u201cfailure\u201d as part of professional development. Brave enough to share your personal tale of woe? Email us at nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s submission comes from Shirley Wu<\/a>, an award-winning software engineer specializing in data art and visualization and co-author of the book Data Sketches<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Do I have horror stories to share? Oh, definitely, quite a few! Although, I\u2019m not sure the label \u201chorror story\u201d always fits\u2014in many of these instances, I was working with clients that I liked (and some that I still work with today!) and we created something valuable, even if the process was rougher than I expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are really only two projects that I beat myself up about for feeling unprofessional. The first is this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2018, I took on a project for a newsroom where I wanted to use a library (Vue.js) that the client wasn\u2019t sure their build process could support. The client was under an extremely tight timeline that I wasn\u2019t confident I could meet\u2014unless I worked in Vue.js. The client\u2019s developer warned me that the project might not be able to deploy if I used Vue, but I felt so much pressure to meet the deadline that I couldn\u2019t see an alternative. I worked around the clock to build that piece in 11 days. I was so proud of it! And then, come time to deploy, of course it didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d started on that piece in October, delivered it in November, and in January we were still<\/em> trying to figure out how to make it deploy. Eventually, the editor ghosted me. I had been paid for the piece itself, but I never got paid for all the hours spent troubleshooting\u2014and saddest of all, the project I worked so hard on and was so proud of never got to see the light of day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my biggest take-aways from that experience is to be considerate of the tech that my clients use<\/strong>. I shouldn\u2019t have insisted on a library that their developer wasn\u2019t sure they could support. That situation ended up teaching me a bit about client management, too: Don\u2019t always cave to client pressure. It\u2019s okay to push back against deadlines that are not technically feasible.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second instance in which I felt unprofessional was a project with one of my long-term, repeat clients that dragged on for a year and a half, and I was never able to deliver. The client had a vague idea of what he wanted \u2013 an internal predictive modeling tool for helping make business decisions \u2013 but he didn\u2019t have a super clear vision of what it should do. I presented 2-3 rounds of designs, but they were never quite what he wanted. I think the project ultimately stalled because neither of us were confident in the direction of the design. Eventually, because he\u2019s a good client, we just moved on to a new project, and yet, for the longest time, I felt like I had lost his trust because I never delivered on that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I\u2019ve come to believe that the project was too far out of my comfort zone\u2014it veered too far into data science and predictive modeling\u2014and I wasn\u2019t confident that I could do what he wanted. At the same time, the client didn\u2019t have a clear vision to guide me. Since then, I\u2019ve realized that I need two things from clients: I need the dataset upfront, and I need them to clearly articulate the goal of the project. <\/strong>They don\u2019t need to have a vision for the design, but they do need to be able to articulate the business use case in 1-2 sentences\u2014what do they want the project to accomplish? What questions do they want answered? What ideas do they want to communicate?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another \u201clearning opportunity\u201d (I\u2019m not going to call it a horror story because it\u2019s a project<\/a> I\u2019m really proud of!) was for an art museum in Hong Kong. With this project, I was caught off-guard by cultural differences. Because I\u2019m Chinese-American and the client spoke English, I didn\u2019t expect there to be major cultural differences, but there were!  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
An excerpt from “Hong Kong artists, women<\/a>” which celebrates the accomplishments and addresses the pervasive underrepresentation of Hong Kong women artists<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As it happened, after the visualization was complete, I had to write an artist statement. There was so much back-and-forth with the client over the statement \u2013 maybe 10 rounds of feedback over four months \u2013 that at one point, I began to wonder if I was writing the artist statement or if they were. In retrospect, their feedback definitely improved the statement, but it took a conversation with a friend to realize that the reason for all the back-and-forth was that words are taken very seriously in Hong Kong, much more seriously than they are in the U.S. The client simply didn\u2019t want to have anyone misunderstand. This was a huge difference from when I wrote an artist statement for SFMOMA (the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and they accepted it without revision because it was intended to be written by me. Now, I can appreciate that my client in Hong Kong was just trying to protect themselves and to protect me. They were a great client overall and supportive of my work, and I recognize now that they were being thoughtful and sensitive to others. My take-away: Anticipate \u2013 and be open to \u2013 cultural differences.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And also: Trust the client\u2019s domain expertise<\/strong>. I\u2019m a software engineer, and I don\u2019t know anything about the art world. The final artist statement is much stronger because of the client\u2019s involvement. I should have trusted that they knew what they were doing. When I work with a client, one of the most important things to me is that they respect my domain expertise with data; I also need to respect their domain expertise. This doesn\u2019t just mean their knowledge of a particular dataset or field\u2014it also means their understanding of the process and the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recounting these stories comes with a lot of emotional baggage! These are all situations I still think about and ruminate on to this day; sharing them is kind of like therapy. And there are so, so many more beyond these three.<\/p>\n

Categories<\/span>Community<\/a> Dataviz Horror Stories<\/a> How To<\/a><\/div>
Tags<\/div>Career<\/a>Community<\/a>Data Visualization<\/a>horror stories<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake in a data visualization? Did you utterly fail to meet your client\u2019s or boss\u2019s vision? 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Perfectly timed to align with Nightingale's Data Sensification Week, we have some exciting, tactile news: dataviz designers and long-time collaborators Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu announced the publication of their\u00a0\u2018Data Sketches\u2019 book! 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