Guiding principles of visualization

1. Guiding principles of visualization

Welcome back again!

2. Driving success

Visualizations aid in the flow of data and insights in many ways different ways. We covered a few of the nearly limitless types of visualizations, and I encourage you to explore more outside of this course to continue your journey with visualizations. In this lesson, we will understand what makes a visualization powerful and how to approach creating impactful visualizations.

3. Getting the right picture

Visualizations are fantastic tools for sharing general information that can be quickly understood and actioned. A common mistake when visualizing data is to relay specific details instead of overall trends. If a visualization relies on knowing exact information to gain benefits from it, then the visualization is not fulfilling its purpose. A commonly utilized visualization known as the pie chart is an example of this in practice.

4. Piece of the pie

Look at this chart. Can you tell what is going on? There are three different slices of the chart, the red section looks like it may be the biggest, but how much bigger is it than the other slices, a lot bigger or just a little? Our minds have a really tough time comparing the areas of different pie shapes to know what is going on intuitively with this graph.

5. Piece of the pie

To compensate for this challenge, exact values from the dataset are often overlaid onto the slices themselves, defeating the entire purpose of the visualization because you end up reading the numbers only to draw a conclusion. It is the same as using the raw data but with more steps.

6. Piece of the pie

Switching the visualization to a bar chart preserves the intended messaging and doesn’t require specific knowledge to understand the visualization. Visualizations are intended to be appetizers to the larger insights meal, not the entire meal itself.

7. Keep it simple

Continuing the theme of being easy to understand, it is essential to avoid unnecessary complexity when crafting visualizations. The first area where complexity is typically introduced is by trying to do too much a visualization. Complex visualizations are helpful on a handful of occasions but should not be the standard method for visualizing results. Aim for a visualization that feels too simplistic instead of overly complicated when in doubt. Complex formats are powerful but require more from the audience to understand and may not achieve your desired effect.

8. Does it bring you joy?

Reducing complexity isn’t limited to your visualization format either. When you construct a visualization, you should look at it and think, are there any unnecessary elements that I can remove? For example, eliminating gridlines, busy color schemes, and excessive chart decorations and effects such as 3-dimensional bars often produce better visuals with minimal effort.

9. Tale of two charts

Here are two charts side by side. They show the same data but are vastly different to interact with. Many of these changes are personal preferences, so try some out and see how much better your visualizations go with your audience. From the first chart to the second, we removed the 3d effect that makes viewing the bars challenging, pivoted the data to make it easier to read, removed the unhelpful color scheme and shrunk the national average gridline to simplify the overall look and feel.

10. Great expectations

The last tip is to give people what they expect. Visualizing is a two-way street. If you deviate severely from your organization’s communication paradigm, your visuals may not be received well. Making minor improvements to your visuals and including your audience will ultimately create better visuals than following a checklist without the audience in mind.

11. Let's practice!

Visualizing data is a complex topic. Try these guidelines out on your next presentation and see how it goes. Let's jump into some exercises to bolster your understanding.

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