In this episode, I’m thrilled to welcome back Duncan Clark from Flourish and Canva to talk about the incredible evolution of both tools over the past few years. We dig into how the Flourish and Canva teams have grown, how they now collaborate, and what that means for users who care about data visualization, storytelling, and workflow. Duncan walks through major updates—including the new Start With Data feature, expanded enterprise security options, and deeper presentation-focused capabilities. We also explore long-standing user requests, dashboarding, and how AI may soon accelerate data-viz workflows. It’s a wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation for anyone who uses—or teaches—data visualization.
Resources
Check out Flourish! And if you’re interested, join the Friends of Flourish Slack channel.
Guest Bio
Duncan Clark is cofounder of data storytelling platform Flourish and Head of EMEA at Canva, the visual communication platform on a mission to empower the entire world to design.
Launched in 2013, Canva has more than 240 million monthly users and more than $3 billion in annual revenue. From presentations to videos to whiteboards, more than 30 billion Canva designs have been created across almost every country in the world. Duncan joined Canva when Flourish was acquired by Canva in 2022. Based in the company’s Europe HQ in London, he oversees Canva across EMEA while still keeping a close eye on Flourish – which serves billions of views of charts and maps each year – as well as Canva’s other data visualisation products.
Before founding Flourish, Duncan worked as a data journalist at The Guardian, where he focused on data visualisation and interactive storytelling. He also co-authored “The Burning Question”, a data-driven analysis detailing climate change as the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It was described by Al Gore as “fascinating, important, and highly recommended”.
Different Ways to Listen to the Show!
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 250 guests and 10 seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests, and sharing the show with your networks. If you’re interested in financially supporting the show, you can sign up for my Patreon platform, make a one-time payment via PayPal, or shop one of the show’s sponsors.
Transcript
00:01.74
Jon
Whoa, Duncan Clark, it’s been ah three and a half years, I think, since we last spoke.
00:08.42
Duncan
Wow, time flies, doesn’t it?
00:10.00
Jon
Time flies when you’re having fun and making tools, right? but How are you?
00:13.78
Duncan
hate see how old that must make me.
00:14.09
Jon
Good to see you.
00:15.82
Duncan
um I’m very well, thank you. Yeah, it’s been an amazingly busy few years. I guess we were probably only pretty fresh out of the Canva acquisition, ah Flourish acquisition by Canva when we last spoke.
00:20.68
Jon
I bet.
00:27.04
Jon
Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think it was like summer of 2022 and the acquisition lease was announced and maybe January or February of 2022.
00:36.32
Duncan
That’s right. Yeah.
00:36.97
Jon
Right.
00:37.08
Duncan
And that’s when we released also the first sort light touch integration.
00:37.17
Jon
Yeah.
00:41.68
Jon
Yeah.
00:41.64
Duncan
I remember actually doing that podcast interview. I was sat in the one meeting room in our old office.
00:45.91
Jon
Yeah.
00:46.70
Duncan
um And back then, you know other than the Flourish team, there was no Canva representation in the UK at all. And there were a scattering of people around Europe.
00:53.45
Jon
Wow.
00:56.23
Duncan
we’ve just that we I just before this did our EMEA all hands, and we’re about people um
01:03.16
Jon
In the UK or in.
01:04.02
Duncan
and across amir
01:05.62
Jon
but Oh yeah.
01:06.92
Duncan
And yeah, probably 300 the UK. And we, um yeah, I’m doing this call from our HQ in Hoxton Square in in Shoreditch.
01:09.45
Jon
Wow.
01:16.22
Duncan
And um so he said it’s very much a different scale of operation from when we last spoke.
01:19.40
Jon
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, um, Yeah, so maybe we just talk about that. Like, you know, what is it what is it like now? what is the What is the relationship between the Canva team and the Flourish team? How’s that all?
01:33.04
Jon
There are a lot of ah releases that have come, obviously, last three years. But even like within, I think, April or so, March or April was like ah another big release on the Flourish side. So lot’s been happening. So like, um yeah, how how have things gone? How do the teams work together? What’s, you know, I guess, like, give us the give us the update.
01:50.28
Duncan
Okay, so yes so we were acquired and we were, we were you know at the time, obviously, inevitably started as a bit of an island, but there was always this idea built into the acquisition that maybe we could be the seed um around which we grew a ah broader European operation. And so that’s very much happened.
02:07.11
Duncan
And it’s extended through to other acquisitions as well. So last year, we acquired Affinity, the amazing pro design tool, um the team for which is based in the UK as well. And the Flourish team, the decision we took at the ah the beginning of the acquisition was to keep running Flourish as a sort of thriving independent startup inside the group, but then also to bring some of that expertise in data viz across to the core Canva product as well, and then to have integration between the two so so you’ve got the basic and the advanced.
02:27.91
Jon
Right.
02:36.84
Jon
right
02:36.88
Duncan
And that’s worked really well. And what it’s meant is we we moved some of the team from Flourish over to Canva. But mostly they stayed on Flourish. But the the native Canva team working on charts and data viz is based in the London office alongside the Flourish team. So we’ve got a real culture of ideas and knowledge sharing there.
02:55.23
Duncan
And… and Yeah, so we’re very much you know we very much see Flourish now as ah as a product unit inside the ah wider Canva org.
03:04.19
Jon
Yeah.
03:04.88
Duncan
Flourish has continued to really thrive. it’s um you know It’s growing really well. It’s got ever more users, ever more customers. Obviously, it’s pretty tiny compared to Canva, which you know where we measure the number of monthly active users in the hundreds of millions.
03:18.79
Duncan
And you know the aspiration is to get to a billion users as soon as we can.
03:19.06
Jon
Yeah.
03:22.73
Duncan
so um You know, it’s it’s little and large in a way, but that’s some that that’s kind of by design. We have a more specialist tool used by leading newsrooms and major corporates and data viz specialists.
03:34.61
Duncan
And then we have um the the mass market tool where people just, you know, have access to what they need without overwhelming them.
03:42.28
Jon
Right. So can you give folks just a ah ballpark sense of the size of the, I mean, I don’t want to say two teams, cause that sounds like they’re different, but the size of Canva writ large, and then the size of flourish.
03:54.50
Duncan
Sure. So the Canva team is about 5,000 people globally. um that extent you know That includes you know like maybe 1,000 people working on customer support and um maybe 1,000 people working on templates and graphic design and stuff like that, as well as the engineering team and the sales team and the marketing team.
04:10.38
Jon
Right.
04:11.35
Duncan
Flourish is probably about 40 people. um And you know there are a couple of people like myself who work across both, but mostly that team is dedicated to Flourish and we found it works best when people can really give all their attention to one product so they’re not context switching too much, um whilst also sharing as much information with the other teams as possible.
04:19.19
Jon
Yeah.
04:29.14
Jon
Yeah.
04:33.31
Jon
So.
04:33.26
Duncan
And so yeah, pretty, pretty small, but in our London, you know, the London office is probably about 200 people.
04:33.43
Jon
um
04:38.63
Duncan
So the flourish team looms much larger in in that community.
04:42.09
Jon
Right, right. So how does it work um in terms of when people are creating, um maybe this is more like a user support question, but like if I’m creating a visualization in flourish in, in on the flourish site versus creating a flourish visualization in Canva, when people ask for help or they want new ideas, like, is that a canvas solution? Is that a flourish solution or is that the people who are the, the go betweens?
05:08.68
Duncan
So you’re basically always in one tool or the other. Even even if you start in Canva and you pop across the Flourish to make something more advanced, you’re then in the Flourish Editor.
05:11.07
Jon
Yeah.
05:15.26
Duncan
and And we’ve deliberately not tried to make them look the same because we want it to be clear which tool you’re using.
05:15.53
Jon
Right.
05:20.30
Duncan
And Hanva’s core product USP is incredible integration and ease of use.
05:20.77
Jon
Right.
05:25.14
Duncan
So the second you’re doing something that’s more complicated or sprawling, you want to be over in a different tool and with its own brand that represents that. um So yeah, basically, if you’re on the Flourish side, then the the support requests go through to the Flourish team if you’re on the Canva side to go through to the Canva team.
05:40.56
Duncan
But we now have some support people um you know sitting with the rest of the Canva team, but focusing on Flourish.
05:40.83
Jon
Gotcha.
05:47.98
Duncan
So it’s a bit more it’s a bit more of a combined approach than it was when we first launched it.
05:53.42
Jon
Yeah. Well, i will say ah shout out to the flourish customer support team ah because they are amazing and they are very fast and very good at, at, at solving these problems that I, these very bespoke problems I have with the tool.
06:05.61
Duncan
That is great.
06:08.67
Duncan
That is great here. And that’s something we really pride ourselves on is being good, not only at getting back to people, but taking seriously and taking almost pleasure in answering those more complicated, is there any way to achieve this?
06:19.63
Jon
Yeah.
06:20.53
Duncan
And sometimes it’s a really complicated workaround solution.
06:22.93
Jon
yeah
06:23.84
Duncan
But one thing we’ve been really lucky at um with the Flourish team is it’s a very slow turnover. so people accumulate a lot of information and knowledge over time.
06:34.49
Jon
Right.
06:34.87
Duncan
and in fact, you know, almost everyone who was at the company when we were acquired is still here four years on.
06:40.76
Jon
Oh, wow.
06:40.99
Duncan
So that I think is a testament to what a good acquiring company we join.
06:46.77
Jon
Yeah.
06:46.83
Duncan
um but it’s also a testament to the fact that it’s just a, you know, happy, productive team who, um, who work really well together. And that obviously helps with customer support because, um,
06:55.95
Jon
For sure.
06:56.77
Duncan
You have experts in customer support themselves, but they also have great working relationships with the engineers or the product managers, whoever else who can help them whenever they need to.
07:04.44
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. A few months ago, just real quick, a few months ago, i pinged ah the customer support team with this very nuanced, detailed question.
07:16.04
Jon
And we ended up batting emails back and forth of like the best way to solve this particular very strange problem. ah And that was that was pretty fun, you know, emailing with someone that I’ve never met before and sort of like hacking away at like how to solve this like really detailed little thing that I wanted to get done.
07:33.95
Jon
um So you mentioned earlier ah corporations, private sector places using Flourish, newsrooms using Flourish. And I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit about where you’re seeing Flourish used the most and and some of the successful like use cases of how people are are building things.
07:51.34
Duncan
Totally. and the I mean, the core use case for Flourish has always been, i mean, we grew out of journalism from a web publishing background. And so the core use case has always been embedding charts on other surfaces and especially on existing websites. So whether that’s a high traffic news site or the marketing section of a big consultancy company or whether it’s a startup,
08:12.45
Duncan
That thing of data to chart to embedded object is is really cool to what we do.
08:16.50
Jon
Right.
08:17.86
Duncan
And that’s actually one thing that fits really well with the Canva integration and the Canva context is Canva is not really like that. Canva is a machine for making documents, reports, and presentations.
08:31.26
Duncan
They’re like the end products.
08:31.45
Jon
right
08:32.86
Duncan
Whereas Flourish is a tool really for making graphics that go elsewhere. So they can go on your website or they can go in Canva. So that’s a kind of nice distinction. and and um But what’s really interesting is we ask customers as they come in to Flourish um you know what they’re hoping to be able to achieve with it. And we’ve noticed an uptick, actually, in people coming in to make presentations.
08:52.63
Duncan
So I think there’s a sort of there’s a trend, maybe a mega trend there, where data viz is a sort of specialty.
08:52.74
Jon
Mm-hmm.
09:00.39
Duncan
you know It started off as a bit more of a web thing, a bit more kind of a… a mass communication tool and very heavy anchor in journalism. And it’s sort of extended out also to obviously BI, data professionals kind of in companies.
09:14.85
Duncan
And I think what we’re starting to see now is just an expectation that data viz has done well, where we do most of our data storytelling, which is actually in presentations. I mean, every day, but billions of PowerPoints are given.
09:22.88
Jon
Mm hmm.
09:25.63
Jon
Yep.
09:25.91
Duncan
And they are all data stories. And yet, you know the tools that people use for those traditionally haven’t been great for actually visualizing and telling stories with data.
09:34.29
Jon
Yes.
09:36.55
Duncan
So a lot of what we’ve done on the Canva side is to say, what would a great data storytelling experience inside a presentation look like?
09:44.71
Jon
Mm hmm.
09:45.16
Duncan
us in you know That’s ah led to us adding some cool features there, like um you know being able to have filters on charts, which there’s no other presentation tool that lets you do that, or um being able to have a nested tree map in your Prezzo natively.
09:55.16
Jon
Mm-hmm.
10:00.36
Duncan
So we’re still sort of experimenting with where the boundary is and and at what point we tell tell people, you want more jump over to Flourish. um But I think that core trend is a really interesting one for Flourish too, that more and more people are actually coming to us but because they’re making a prezzo.
10:17.28
Jon
Yeah. I, I, just from a lot of my clients, I’ve seen them move to flourish. They are building like the monthly or, or biweekly board deck,
10:29.30
Jon
In PowerPoint, they burn it as a PDF or whatever, and then they send it around as a very big file and it’s hard to update and manage. Whereas in flourish, you can create it in a story where someone could just click left or right and they can interact with it. And it’s much easier to update the data every, you know, every quarter or every month or every week or whatever it is.
10:49.29
Jon
Um, and you’re just sharing a ah URL at that point, right? You’re not sure.
10:51.83
Duncan
technically
10:52.51
Jon
Big file. Um, The one thing I did, I was curious about is in your experience for private sector companies, particularly private sector companies, and probably not newsrooms who want to keep their data in house or keep it sort of locked down um and not sort of put their stuff up into the browser right away. What is the, what is the solution that they’re trying?
11:14.88
Duncan
So we have a couple of different solutions. so that people People have different levels of sort guardrails that they want to stay inside.
11:21.20
Jon
Right.
11:21.82
Duncan
We’ve always taken security incredibly seriously. um fact, when we were acquired by Canva, they put the red hat hackers that they have.
11:31.83
Jon
Oh, really?
11:32.59
Duncan
yeah I mean, I say they at the time, obviously we now have some of the best
11:35.67
Jon
Yeah.
11:36.66
Duncan
kind of security engineers in the world trying to always hack into the camera system.
11:40.61
Jon
Yeah.
11:40.78
Duncan
And they were unleashed on Flourish. And the lead hacker was so disappointed that he wasn’t able to break in.
11:43.23
Jon
Yeah.
11:46.27
Duncan
And yeah, don’t want to tempt fate.
11:48.28
Jon
yeah Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Knock on wood. Yeah.
11:49.92
Duncan
We’ve always taken security really seriously. And what we’ve we’ve noticed a trend where at the beginning of Flourish, customers will sometimes come to us and say, we want to use this, but we can only use on-prem.
11:59.56
Jon
Yeah.
12:00.45
Duncan
And we took a decision, we’re just not going to build on-prem. It slows your development cycle too much. So for for non-technical viewers, that means that you’re running the software entirely on the local network. There’s no cloud presence at all.
12:12.87
Duncan
And then we found people saying, oh, well, we don’t need on-prem anymore, but we need local cloud. So you can still be hosted on the cloud, but we want it to be a cloud that we’re completely in control of.
12:18.76
Jon
Mm hmm.
12:22.12
Jon
Right.
12:23.05
Duncan
And now the trend seems to be settling towards But where where everyone seems to be landing is sure the cloud is the future, like everyone is on the cloud.
12:32.34
Jon
Right.
12:32.68
Duncan
um But what you need is really world-class security features, including things like customer managed encryption keys.
12:36.61
Jon
Mm hmm.
12:39.93
Duncan
So that even if it’s on a shared database, no one can, even if the database was hacked, the customer controls the encryption key that the that controls their particular subset of data.
12:50.45
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
12:51.38
Duncan
So we’re actually working on a bunch of features like that and working really closely with some of our biggest customers to to make sure that meets their needs. um So I guess that’s one way, it’s just making the cloud more secure.
13:03.90
Jon
yeah
13:04.03
Duncan
We also launched several years ago an API for our enterprise users. And what that lets you do is actually be completely off grid because Most APIs for data, what they involve doing is taking your data and injecting it into a third-party system.
13:18.52
Duncan
The way our API works is that it actually pulls the visualization template from Flourish
13:18.86
Jon
yeah
13:25.77
Duncan
puts it into your local system, you pass the data in there, and then it renders it there. So you can actually make, ah you would you know whether it’s a dashboard or or it just ah an intranet chart whatever, you can do that without any data going to Flourish.
13:29.74
Jon
Oh,
13:38.04
Duncan
So that’s kind of almost on-prem.
13:39.45
Jon
oh yeah.
13:40.61
Duncan
And it also gives you programmatic updates because you’re already passing the data in with scripts.
13:40.68
Jon
Right.
13:44.55
Jon
Mm hmm.
13:44.97
Duncan
You can also update the data with scripts. So that’s another way that you can do it. A third way, which is just maybe worth mentioning is how our integration works with Canva.
13:55.52
Duncan
So the way that works is generally, if you’re making a ah board deck, you’re not going to be publishing that deck as private information.
14:02.27
Jon
Right.
14:02.72
Duncan
and So you might make your complicated chart in Flourish that tells the data story. You go over to Canva, you you add it via the app, and it’s a fully into interactive embedded chart.
14:10.78
Jon
Mm-hmm.
14:13.92
Jon
Right.
14:14.27
Duncan
But you’ve never hit the publish button. So it’s actually on an authenticated URL that you can revoke um and which is never exposed to the wider world.
14:23.14
Jon
Oh, interesting.
14:24.48
Duncan
And so that’s ah that’s a kind of third way. So there are all these different ways, and but it’s a really big theme for us um because obviously data security is really primary for almost every type of user.
14:28.15
Jon
Yeah.
14:34.15
Jon
Yeah. And are you seeing, i often wonder about this because in Canva, there’s a lot of like infographic bespoke templates that, you know, Canva and others have created.
14:45.30
Jon
Are you seeing people create interactive infographics in Canva where they’re build out some, you know, beautiful looking frame and then they drop in a bunch of graphs from flourish?
14:55.44
Duncan
but but there There are definitely a lot of templates that have charts in. um It’s interesting, actually. I was discussing this with the team recently. i think there is a tendency for the sorts of people who do template design to be graphic designers.
15:09.48
Jon
Yeah.
15:09.57
Duncan
And of course, you know the the camva team and the sorry the the Flourish team and the Canva Data Viz team obviously have a much deeper domain knowledge in data. And so, in fact, when we launched Canva Sheets, which we did back in April,
15:22.81
Duncan
we had the Flourish team lean in to support with the templates because someone who’s more of a graphic designer by background, you know they they they might make something that’s beautiful, but the use case isn’t actually what someone would do with the spreadsheet.
15:25.83
Jon
ah
15:29.12
Jon
Right.
15:35.21
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
15:35.55
Duncan
um so you know one of our wonderful team members, Sham, in um who sits in the Philippines, she really lent in and helped with all those templates to make them more realistic and more and also make sure that the visualizations were good examples that…
15:48.68
Duncan
um captured good data viz practice as well. So yeah, I think we can do more there. I think um i think bringing more data domain expertise into the template creation process is what we’ll see.
15:59.29
Jon
Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. um Okay. So um let’s talk, I want to talk about two of, so I want to talk about two of my my bugaboos with with Flourish and then we can talk about the the future.
16:11.72
Jon
Okay.
16:12.20
Duncan
Okay.
16:12.35
Jon
so ah So here’s my here’s my biggest complaint. Now this is this is very detailed, but anybody who’s used Flourish knows this problem. problem So you create a visualization and flourish for those who haven’t used flourish, by the way, you can just paste your data in and then go make the graph. It’s basically that easy.
16:29.22
Jon
So you paste your data in, you make a graph, change all your settings. And then you say, oh, I need to update the data with another year, whatever it is, copy it, paste it back into flourish. There’s little box that comes up with a little settings word.
16:42.84
Jon
And if you click the arrow next to settings, it drops down with these couple of checkboxes that basically says, let flourish determine the data format, et cetera, et cetera. And if you fail to uncheck those boxes, it is possible, even likely that all your work it gets erased because it it sort of redetermines the the data value. so So that’s my big complaint.
17:05.17
Jon
So I’ve i’ve sent that off to to customer service all times, but you’ve got that, but I want to, you were going to tell me about why it’s sort of the UI sort of set up that way.
17:06.83
Duncan
ah Okay. That’s,
17:15.58
Duncan
Yeah, i mean, that’s really interesting feedback. And um I can immediately think of ways that that can and should be improved. The reason we did that um is that we introduced the concepts of data typing into Flourish. The first version, all the data was just stored as strings.
17:28.99
Jon
Hmm.
17:29.44
Duncan
And that had certain disadvantages. And so we wanted to have type data. And of course, when you type data, you paste the data in, one of the things you need to do is interpret it and guess what type it is.
17:34.47
Jon
Right. Yeah.
17:39.65
Jon
yeah
17:39.80
Duncan
which isn’t always trivial because it might be that you know you’ve got special characters in there, like you might written MAU or M for millions, but actually it’s a number. So you need to deal with that stuff.
17:48.48
Jon
ah
17:49.31
Duncan
And then the other thing you can do with Flourish, which is quite distinctively Flourish-shaped for this category of tool, is that you’ve got these things called data bindings where you can choose which column to use in which way.
18:01.50
Jon
yeah
18:01.83
Duncan
And what we found is that if you had a new user coming in, they’d throw their data in. And if you didn’t reset the column bindings, then the data bindings, then sometimes the chart would just be broken and users would think, oh, I don’t and don’t like this tool.
18:16.59
Duncan
It’s not a problem.
18:17.05
Jon
Right.
18:18.17
Duncan
So what we wanted to make sure is when people throw data in, they always get a working visualization. And what you’re saying, I think, is that you throw the data in, you get the working visualization, then you change it a bit, but you might throw an updated data set in
18:29.93
Jon
Right.
18:30.64
Duncan
And I can immediately think of a thing there where you know if the data, call the inferred column types haven’t changed, we should just leave it as is. That would be easy.
18:37.02
Jon
Right.
18:38.02
Duncan
But maybe there’s also a thing where if you uncheck those boxes once, then it’s stored in that visualization, and you’ve done that, and and and it’s persist.
18:38.11
Jon
right
18:43.48
Jon
A’s unchecked. Right.
18:45.37
Duncan
So I’m sure, John, that we can solve your problem.
18:46.03
Jon
Yeah.
18:49.95
Duncan
It’s genuinely useful to hear. you know I think um you know we try to be super reactive to user feedback. And um so, yeah, we we really, really value it when you and others let us know where think theyre that there could be an improvement.
19:02.85
Jon
Well, yeah, i I appreciate that. And I will, i okay. So I will take credit for one thing then, because now this was probably, you know, a year and a half ago when I really started getting into flourish, I made, i think I made a box and whisker chart with the data on it, which is one of the big things that I really like about flourish is that you can sort of turn on and off different sort of uncertainty charts for lack of better term.
19:26.42
Jon
So I’d put this box of whisker plot and it sat on top of the data.
19:28.89
Duncan
Mm-hmm.
19:30.41
Jon
And so I wasn’t able to actually click on the data points anymore. it was just on the box. And so I complained about that a little bit. And so now there’s a toggle where you could say which one do you interact with.
19:42.32
Jon
Now I call that the Schwabish toggle, but I don’t think that language is, I don’t think that’s that’s caught on yet, but again,
19:44.58
Duncan
ah what
19:48.39
Duncan
Oh, it’s great. i mean, we loved that when um we had someone on the team in the early days um called Katie, and she was really anti-legends.
20:01.72
Duncan
She hated legends and she much preferred the thing where you colorize the text.
20:01.95
Jon
Yeah.
20:05.26
Jon
Yeah.
20:05.68
Duncan
um And so that has actually become known as the Riley legend. She was called Katie Riley.
20:10.54
Jon
Yeah.
20:11.12
Duncan
And so we added a feature where you just check a box.
20:12.02
Jon
yeah
20:13.84
Duncan
And if the series name matches some of the text in the title, they would just automatically colorize it with the right color.
20:14.54
Jon
yep
20:19.51
Jon
yeah
20:20.37
Duncan
And um so, yeah, there is a bit of a history of naming features, even if informally after people. So now we know what that was
20:26.26
Jon
All right. All right. Well, when I, when i next time I get over to London and stop by, I expect it to be on a wall somewhere or something like that.
20:31.80
Duncan
for. OK, yeah.
20:33.40
Jon
Yeah.
20:33.92
Duncan
We’ll engrave the bricks back here.
20:35.86
Jon
Yeah. Okay. So the other, so the other, I don’t think this is, this is not a ah complaint. This is like a feature. So, and I’ll, I’ll put it this way.
20:46.66
Jon
Um, when if I wanted to create a dashboard in flourish, I can’t have my graphs talk to each other. I mean, and we could talk about how you can actually do that, ah but out of the box, you can’t create like a line chart, bar chart and map and have them all talk to each other, which would be a fairly, I would say straightforward, basic dashboard.
21:07.76
Jon
um And so I’ll ask the question in in two ways. um One, well, maybe three ways. So one, When Flourish was starting out, was that I assume that was a conscious decision not to sort of ah sort of enable that capabilities, technologically-wise or just you know work-wise. um And then the other two questions are really like, are there plans to enable that in the future out of the box? And then maybe if you want to talk about for folks who are curious about this, how you actually can do this with some more sophisticated programming and stuff around it.
21:43.00
Duncan
Sure. um
21:43.61
Jon
A lot are all around that dashboarding piece is really the question.
21:45.56
Duncan
Yeah, so maybe I’ll do it in reverse order.
21:46.09
Jon
Yeah.
21:47.32
Duncan
So there is a way to do that at the moment with our API, which is that is an enterprise feature.
21:48.06
Jon
Right. Yeah.
21:51.36
Duncan
But the the way that works is that you can render whatever chart you want and pass the data in. So you could even make a filter or set buttons at the top update all the charts together.
21:56.19
Jon
right
21:59.50
Duncan
So that’s the way that um some customers do it already.
21:59.86
Jon
yeah
22:04.32
Duncan
Go back to your first question, like was this part of a conscious decision at the beginning? I would say yes, but only with a time horizon of about six months. In fact, i think one of the first customer feedback calls I ever did was with Alberto Cairo, who was probably like user number eight or something on the Flourish system.
22:21.90
Jon
Right.
22:22.34
Duncan
And his feedback was, love it, love it, love it. I want small multiples and I want dashboards. And we were like, well, we don’t, well, let’s do small multiples, but, um which we did quite early, but we decided to shelve dashboards for say six months or so, because it would be a new top level entity type.
22:38.92
Jon
Yeah.
22:39.27
Duncan
We did a bit of design on it actually, but yeah, We just have never got around to it since. And it’s really ah like always the case in a small software company that you have all these different user requests.
22:51.72
Jon
Right.
22:52.52
Duncan
And some of them sound small, but they turn into big projects, like having shared shared folders was a big one we did recently so that business users can and newsrooms can share, collaborate better.
22:58.37
Jon
Yeah.
23:03.69
Duncan
um So there’s lots of things that come along that you think, well, the user value to our current customers, it you know probably just trumps this other idea.
23:13.91
Duncan
But it’s always a balance because by adding the ah the the new surfaces, you you open up new types of users. And actually, dashboarding would be ah really interesting one for ah Flourish.
23:20.80
Jon
sure
23:23.18
Duncan
So that’s definitely something that um I think we’re likely to come back to. i mean, the other thing that’s interesting is that Canva has moved us a bit in that direction. Because Canva, you can make a whiteboard or a deck or or a surface or a dock.
23:34.81
Jon
Right.
23:36.16
Duncan
You could put multiple charts in it all connected to one sheet.
23:39.02
Jon
Yes.
23:39.91
Duncan
And so in a way, you can make it a basic dashboard now in Canva.
23:40.08
Jon
Right.
23:43.71
Duncan
And I think then the natural next step might be making it possible to connect those into Flourish charts, at which point a lot of that foundational surface layer would be there.
23:49.38
Jon
Yeah.
23:55.27
Jon
Right. I mean, i think this is a thing about, as an example, Tableau, if you want like a really cool bespoke background image, um, that’s not just a solid color and you want different shapes, whatever you have to build that in a Canva or in a Figma or PowerPoint and bring in that image.
24:13.24
Jon
Whereas I could go to Canva now build out an infographic or a lovely dashboard, and then just, you know, just literally drop in my graphs from flourish and, you know, stitch them together and have a dashboard.
24:25.57
Duncan
Totally. And I think that, um you know, you only need to add a couple of different elements there, like standalone filters that drive different things, and you could have something really powerful.
24:26.43
Jon
Yeah.
24:31.04
Jon
Yeah.
24:34.55
Duncan
So that’s definitely an interesting area for us to explore going forward.
24:35.19
Jon
Yeah.
24:38.97
Duncan
It’s definitely not something we’ve decided not to do indefinitely.
24:42.50
Jon
Yeah, just, I mean, now, ah on the other hand, ah it is unclear to me, and this is an idea that’s been bouncing around my head now for the last few months, how useful a lot of dashboards actually are for public, um, uh,
24:59.51
Jon
Public communication now internally is a different story and then maybe we don’t care how they actually look because we’re just working together. But, you know, perhaps a ah straightforward ah dashboard with a couple of graphs on it makes sense. But I often wonder whether we ah the dashboarding community makes these, you know, very lovely, beautiful, intricate things and nobody actually uses it.
25:20.62
Duncan
Oh, completely. And I mean, in a way I was being a bit glib earlier when I just said, oh, we didn’t get around to it. But the the the bigger sort of philosophical theme there was we were really conscious when we launched Flourish that we were building a data storytelling tool.
25:32.96
Jon
Right.
25:32.98
Duncan
and And that focus on storytelling, whether it was on online or in a deck, um has always been our sort of guiding star that sort of separates us from other products.
25:44.38
Duncan
And so… I guess that you know that that question of how useful is a dashboard really is something we’ve we’ve often asked. I think there are times when they’re really useful and and as you you know maybe as data viz gets pulled more into presentations and more into internal use cases, then that will become in a really interesting area for us.
26:02.04
Duncan
But yeah, that I couldn’t agree more. I think um it’s very easy to understand the value that’s added by good storytelling.
26:09.22
Jon
Right.
26:09.55
Duncan
When it comes to dashboards, really it’s a form of analysis visual visual analysis, but it doesn’t always get used that way. And um so, yeah, we wouldn’t want to go into it just for the sake of it.
26:17.36
Jon
right
26:20.68
Jon
Right, right. um Okay, ah so I feel like we’ve solved the major issues of Flourish. i’ve got I’ve got all that undressed. um ah Let’s talk about the the future. um I’m sure you have a bunch of things in the can that you probably can’t tell us about, um but maybe we could talk about two things. So one is the recent release of the Start With Data uh tab uh that’s a pretty exciting piece and then of course and a little i say this with a little bit of a side but i’m sure people are wondering this like uh how is ai gonna be how’s ai gonna you know show its head and in in in flourish and and i mean you could talk about canva if you want as well because i know it’s it’s already in canva um but maybe we start with the let’s start with data tab and then we can talk about ai in the future
26:44.79
Duncan
you
27:05.22
Duncan
Sure, yeah. So, i mean, the big picture thinking here, and and the thinking for this goes back several years, um as we added more and more visualization types to Flourish, and Flourish has always sort prided itself in offering more visualization types than most other tools. So you can make Sankey’s and chord diagrams and Marimekos and all these different things.
27:25.44
Duncan
um And you can make sort of sophisticated combinations of things. Like you could put make small multiples, but lay them out on a grid map or whatever.
27:32.16
Jon
Yeah.
27:32.53
Duncan
So the more functionality you add, the challenge users can feel that they don’t know how to choose. And there can be a couple of different bits to that. it might be literally, i feel a bit overwhelmed. Where do I start?
27:46.67
Duncan
But it could also be, I want to try these 10 different visualization approaches with this data, but it’s going to take me half an hour. And then I end up with 10 sort of orphan projects in my project list.
27:54.27
Jon
yeah
27:59.78
Duncan
And it all just feels a bit messy. So what we wanted to do was to shortcut a lot of that for the user and get them to value as fast as possible, whilst also encouraging them to explore visualization types that they might not have thought of making in advance.
28:17.32
Duncan
The other bit in the mix there is data formatting. So if you come in to a data vis tool, very often you might have long data rather than wide, or wide rather than long. Or you might have data that’s been transposed, so it’s ripe for a line chart, but it’s laid out differently from how Flourish is expecting et cetera.
28:36.04
Duncan
So what we wanted to do is just have a system where you can just throw in data. We will take care of the formatting and the layout and the manipulation. We will then attach that to different visualization types.
28:47.40
Duncan
We will then render them all with different column bindings so you can tell different stories. And we’ll just stick them all in front of you so you can say, oh, that one looks good, or that’s exciting.
28:55.00
Jon
Mm-hmm.
28:56.95
Duncan
Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that one. And you click from there to go into the editor. So that’s how it works. And it’s it feels, people often assume it’s an AI feature because it’s quite magical, um the way that it works.
29:09.13
Duncan
But it isn’t AI. The way we did it was actually with heuristics. We we analyze the data. We pivot it. We unpivot it. We transpose it. And then what we do is we actually we score it um against all the other visualization types in in Flourish for what category of data and what characteristics of data they expect.
29:28.45
Jon
Right.
29:28.54
Duncan
And then we serve them up in the order of how well they’ve matched. So the idea is it’s quite a long list, but the ones at the top are often the ones that work best. And um sometimes you might get you know two different line charts or two different bar charts or two different pack circle diagrams or two different survey visualizations, whatever, because we’ve actually tried different data binding options as well.
29:49.59
Jon
right
29:49.66
Duncan
So yeah, users love that. it’s some I think especially for people who have being Flourish users for a while, sometimes they know what they want to make, but they know it’s going to take them five minutes. And now it’s like oh, I’m just going to the data in.
30:00.86
Duncan
I know it will come up and I’ll click it. And it’s suddenly two seconds rather than 200 seconds.
30:02.46
Jon
Right. Yeah.
30:05.59
Duncan
But also for new users, and I think this is something we’ll probably push even harder soon. um Like it almost feels to me like you should be able to do this right on the Flourish homepage. Like you come in, you’ve never used Flourish before, just throw a spreadsheet in and boom, it’s there.
30:18.58
Duncan
So there’s lots of cool stuff I think we can do to further
30:18.95
Jon
Right.
30:23.68
Duncan
expose this to users. Currently, it’s a tab on the template chooser, but um i think it will be more and more prominent over time.
30:25.14
Jon
Mm hmm.
30:28.77
Jon
Yeah, that is really, that is really cool. um without but Without betraying any ah any secrets, um or maybe just generally speaking, like what should what are what should the Flourish user community like be excited about coming up in the next six months, year, whatever it might be?
30:46.88
Duncan
So we’ve got a really exciting um updated offering with Canva coming up. So keep your eyes open for that in the next couple of months. um We’ve got some really interesting workflow tools coming up. Lots of users have been telling us about their You know, their desire to to not just have off-the-shelf templates, but more like homemade ones or custom ones.
31:12.53
Duncan
So there’s stuff coming up around that.
31:12.90
Jon
Oh.
31:14.38
Duncan
Those could be more curated. um
31:16.67
Jon
yeah
31:17.06
Duncan
We’ve got interesting things coming up around the theme that I mentioned of more and more users being interested in presentations.
31:24.41
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:24.68
Duncan
And we’ve also got some really interesting InfoSec features launching that will really put us in a sort of enterprise grade situation where, you know, we can confidently tell a financial org, yes, we we meet all your very high-end requirements for InfoSense.
31:32.77
Jon
Yeah.
31:41.78
Jon
Oh, nice.
31:42.65
Duncan
So all of that stuff is coming up and loads of more specific things as well. um And yeah, I mean, on the AI question you asked about, we haven’t actually launched any AI features inside Flourish yet.
31:50.44
Jon
Yeah.
31:53.80
Duncan
We’ve been quite careful not to do it for the sake of it.
31:57.23
Jon
hmm.
31:57.85
Duncan
um And also there’s a sort of pricing and costing question, which is, you know, how best a price for it, given that it’s not free to run. And, um but we’ve got some really interesting prototypes now running and in the building here um where AI is really being used to short circuit, um slightly painful workflow points.
32:19.52
Duncan
And so I think, you know, I would definitely say watch this space in the in the next six months for for the first offerings of of that sort. Because, um yeah, I’ve been pretty amazed by what a game changer it feels once you’re using it
32:31.21
Jon
Yeah, yeah, for sure. um Before i I let you go, um what would your recommendation be for folks who are listening to this or like, I’m going to, you know, just getting started. they’re like, oh I’m going to try out flourish. Like, where would you point them in terms of how to learn how to use the tool and, you know, sort of get on that, that learning curve?
32:53.61
Duncan
I would say, well, start maybe by browsing the examples page, just because that will give you a sense of all the different kinds of things you can do. um And also, that gives you a sense of the the story output.
33:06.10
Duncan
So you know you start by making visualization, and then you can tell a story with multiple visualizations. So it’s quite useful for inspiration to start by looking at some stories on the example page. Then I would say go in, browse the template chooser, um but also click that tab for start with data and try just throwing in a spreadsheet and you will find within five seconds that you’ve made a bunch of visualization types, some of which you never will have tried before probably, and click through and edit them and let us know how it goes. Yeah, we’re we’re um more and more kind of
33:37.86
Duncan
when users When free users are sharing stuff online, we’re we’re really keen to share and promote their great work. So yeah, I look forward to seeing what these new users make.
33:44.86
Jon
Yeah.
33:47.50
Jon
Terrific. Yeah. Terrific. Duncan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s been great. And I look forward to seeing all these, all these new features. And of course, you know, another Schwabish toggle that we can, we can.
33:58.90
Duncan
Totally, yeah, we’ll we’ll get we’ll get the engraving going on the wall.
33:59.33
Jon
and Yeah.
34:01.46
Duncan
and
34:01.72
Jon
ah Yeah. Right. All right.
34:02.60
Duncan
forward to seeing.
34:02.96
Jon
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
34:04.60
Duncan
All right, great to chat. Thank you.
