I used to work at Medium on the product science team before this tool was created. I didn't work on it myself, although I can appreciate how well it works in practice. The simplicity-of-use of this tool, both as a data provider and as a visualization consumer, is incredible.
I can imagine some HN readers thinking they want more detailed graph control, but the few options + the defaults on this tool cover a surprising range of use cases. I think you have to try it on your own data to appreciate the subtle decisions that went into the design.
This is a neat idea, but I think it's a bit too minimal. What I like about it is it tries to just Do The Right Thing for your chart setup. Unfortunately, a lot of that assumes that the data is already prepared in The Right Way. Therein lies the crux.
Playing around with it briefly, it looks like your data already needs to be filtered to only the columns you want displayed and presumably pre-aggregated. The question is should your tool help you do that. That's where BI comes in, but the tradeoff is you lose the simplicity with all the BI tools out there (eg can you explain a join to your marketing manager? How about the difference between a measure and dimension?)
At DataHero.com we're building the best of both worlds -- both a tool that can automatically do The Right Thing in terms of your chart setup, but also have enough intelligence under the hood to prepare it The Right Way without having any technical background. BI and visualization are still a technical person's playground... once a tool can automatically understand what's in your data AND automatically understand the best way of putting it all together, that's how you make "Data" accessible to the larger market.
This is a great tool in making Data as accessible as possible, but it's missing the step on going from the raw data to the prepared data (and making it easy/intelligent/automatic enough that you don't need to understand a join to do it).
Hi, I'm on the team at Medium that launched Charted today. No, Charted wasn't built to be used in blog posts. It was built as an internal tool to, among other things, share simple data query results and create ad-hoc dashboards (as part of the general data analysis our Product Science team does).
I can imagine some HN readers thinking they want more detailed graph control, but the few options + the defaults on this tool cover a surprising range of use cases. I think you have to try it on your own data to appreciate the subtle decisions that went into the design.