Visualizations that really work

After working on the visualization exercise 2 I really got to appreciate the amount of effort taken by designers to convey the meaning of the charts effectively. Tools such as Tableau give us chart suggestions to choose from depending on the measures and dimensions we choose. The advantage of this is translating the chosen attributes into a visualization is convenient for anyone even without data skills. But, this doesn’t necessarily serve the purpose of the insights that you would want your visualization to communicate. (Going back to our viz exercise 2, it may not be enough if you compare MSIS with other degrees it would be more effective to show MSIS is a better program to choose because it offers a more stable mid-career pay with less uncertainty.)

Steering away from viz exercise 2, on a general note when you’re trying to think through the purpose of your visualization you could start of by answering two questions:

1. Is your data trying to show ideas or statistics? – this leans more towards the underlying data rather than the form of visualization. E.g. for idea – organization structure chart. E.g. for data-driven – Revenue growth for last five years.
2. Are you declaring something or exploring something? – An example of declaring something is if you want to project the quarterly sales of 2016 to your manager with the available sales data. However, if you want to understand why the sales performance is lagging. You suspect that there is a seasonal drop and want to prove the same with a quick visual which become an exploratory kind of visualization where form takes priority over the available information.

Now that you know what you want to communicate to your audience the next step would be to analyze the type of the chart to choose (i.e. when to use a bar chart over line chart). Also, thinking through an effective way of using the color palette. Other aspects could be the ordering in a bar graph, starting your x axis from zero, etc. While following, these chart making rules you should always make sure your chart is communicating your claim/insight clearly.

Reference – https://hbr.org/2016/06/visualizations-that-really-work