Create Impactive Charts in Simple Steps
In data visualization, less is more!
Let’s play a short game before starting here…
So… Ask yourself, how many times do you stare at a confusing chart in a meeting? Or how many times you thought “Wow! there is a lot of colors for a pie chart”? I bet you that you remembered some situations like that.
We all know that we need to worry about data visualization, such as showing a chart, table, or map. Actually is very easy to present data, the hard work is to get people to understand your message, and generate some engagement.
Well, I only presented problems for you so far ( sorry to make you remembered that colorful chart ), let’s change the way of our conversation, and to do that I’ll ask for help from a site that I love to read when I need some inspiration.
Have you know DarkHorse Analytics? Well, I recommend you to visit them, but not now! Stay with me for a little, I’ll use a series of Gifs that they made to show you how simple is to improve your data viz skills.
Bar Charts
The gif is auto-explanatory, but let’s make a resume from it.
- Remove unnecessary lines: Borderlines, grid lines, axis lines, remove any line! Well, we know that you’ll face some situations that will be not possible, so if you can’t do that, so let it be less impactive, a light gray will help you.
- Remove unnecessary colors: To get your public attention you need to beat any competitors, and many colors play against you, so remove them, you have this power. Leave only two or three colors, and make it represent some information, an alert for example.
- For numbers prefer exactly values: If you leave your audience the axis values you’ll lose them, they will need a lot of neurons to extract some information, save those neurons! Place the exact value on top inside the bar.
- Legends, a case of love and hate: Sometimes you’ll need legends to save those neurons that I mentioned before, it helps the audience understand your data better, but try to avoid duplicated information, remember, sometimes less is more.
Tables
Now let’s take a look into what we can do with tables:
- Lines again: The first thing that we need to do is take out all unnecessary lines again and again… Why is this so important? It’s because those lines do not have any important information, so why do we need to keep them?
- Left aligns text and right aligns numbers: It’s a simple step that organizes your label, It’s make easy to understand, to read your numbers, to identify outliers, so we need always to pay attention to that.
- Make your numbers simple: Here is the big step for tables, a lot of comma, points, and zeros will make your public get freaking out, so again you need to save them, make it simple, for example, 100.2K is much more readable than 100200.00.
- Work with emphasis: To close this topic I’ll talk about emphasis, tables have more information than charts and our mind suffer to extract some conclusion, but, tables is a pretty good tool to summarize information, show comparisons and we need to use it, so again, help the neurons. If you’re working on building a dashboard, a heat map will be your friend, if you’re in the middle of a presentation, clarify your point, give your users your analysis, lead them into your story.
Maps
Humans love maps, without them, the world will not be the same, so let’s take a look at how we can make them show better information:
- Say no to colorful maps: More colors are more unnecessary information, and at this point, you already notice that I don’t like it, so prefer tons of the same color, It’s more readable, simple, strong tons mean big concentration and weak tons less concentration.
- Save time for the legend: When we talk about maps legend must be effective! Legend is a part of a map, It’s different than bar chart or other kinds of visualizations that the choice is in your hands, here you need to be sure that your audience will understand your data with a simple look into a legend.
Pie Chart
We’re almost ending here, so now let’s talk about the pie chart, the only thing that I have to say about it is… Avoid using pie charts. Serious guys this is a very confusing type of chart and can lead your public to wrong conclusions, but I like to say that It’s not a rule if you feel comfortable about your pie chart, please use it, but to minimize the famous pie chart problems here is a list of things that you can do to make it more clear:
- Avoid using it with more than 3 classifications
- Do not use 3D (Actually this is a rule for all kinds of data viz)
- Remove borders
- Emphasis on what matters
Conclusion
There is a lot of ways to create good charts, and as I already said, there is no rule about that, but above are some good practices in the data visualization world. This is a part of our profession that merges good knowledge in analysis and design and we know that for some people It’s hard to do that.
I hope you enjoyed the read and help me save more neurons over the world, share the knowledge!
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