2019 Annual Data Visualization Survey Results

TLDR: We all need more time.

In 2017 and 2018 I ran an exhaustive survey of the data visualization community to try to better understand the trends and issues that were most important to our community. With the founding of the Data Visualization Society, I thought it made sense for that survey to pass over to the DVS so that it could be better designed and its responses better handled by a real organization, rather than a single individual.

The 2019 edition of the survey ran from May to June and received over 1350 responses. I’m happy to announce those responses have been cleaned up and are publicly available here. You can find the 2017 & 2018 data here.

The results maintain a theme seen in last year’s survey that, at least among respondents, we are seeing a real youth movement in the profession. Half of the responses indicated 3 or fewer years of experience. Gender diversity still skews dramatically toward men, who outnumber women practitioners 2 to 1.

There’s an interesting detail in the questions that posed a few standard phrases about data visualization and asked how strongly the respondent agreed or disagreed with them. One question asked whether respondents were on the lookout for new tools. The answer was one which we might expect, with a significant agreement that…