The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need for the Data Visualisation

The purpose of visualisation is insights, not pictures

Many of us fall into this trap of having great colourful charts at the cost of misleading information that we are trying to portray.

I have always tried to keep it simple and mostly was able to visualise using popular charts and sticking to the primary colours. Keeping that in mind, today I am going to list 5 major points to stick to for effective visualisation which tells a compelling story.

What chart should I use?

I think this is the most important question after we have cleaned our data and we are ready to visualise it. To answer this question, let’s ask more questions :

How many variables do you want to show in a single chart? It can be a single axis or multiple axes charts.

How many data points will you display for each variable? It can be only 5 or a million

Will you display values over a period of time, or among items or groups? We can be interested in showing trends, category wise summary etc.

There are 1000 charts present but all of those charts comes under some category, for instance, if we want a visualization method that shows relationships and connections between the data or shows correlations between two or more variables, it comes under the Relationship category.

Please refer to this catalogue for all the categories and the chart to use for that.

Data Ink Ratio

The Data-Ink ratio is a concept introduced by Edward Tufte, the expert whose work has contributed significantly to designing effective data presentations.

According to Tufte, all ink that does not depict statistical information, or “chartjunk,” should be removed and that higher data-ink ratios will result in faster judgments and increased accuracy in graph reading tasks.

Do this to improve the data-ink ratio :

Remove Backgrounds

Remove redundant labels

Remove borders and bolding

Remove or Lighten lines

Add direct data labels

Reduce colours

Remove special effects

You can observe the images and see that how much easier it is to extract information from the second graph.

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Colours

The colours are an integral part of any chart and overall visualization but contextual integration of colours is very important, too many colours in the chart can make it less reliable and less can make it clunky. The following points can be kept in mind while achieving the trade-off :

In any chart, don’t use more than six colours.

For comparing the same value at different time periods, use the same colour in a different intensity (from light to dark).

For different categories, use different colours. The most widely used colours are black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow. (Notice that they are all widely used primary)

Keep the same colour palette or style for all charts in the series, and the same axes and labels for similar charts to make your charts consistent and easy to compare. (For instance for Airbnb , take the brand colour #FF5A60, to keep the consistency use the same colour and palette in all of the charts)

Finally, know your audience . Charts should be created ensuring they are readable for colour-blind people.

Coming back to data

Even if the data is clean, free of any duplicate, bad strings, null values or any other unwanted substances, a logical understanding of data is important for plotting two or more variables from a table.

The numbers in a chart (displayed as bar, area, bubble, or other physically measured elements in the chart) should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities presented.

Also, for column and bar charts, to enable easier comparison, sort your data in ascending or descending order by the value, not alphabetically. This applies also to pie charts.

When using time in charts, set it on the horizontal axis. Time should run from left to right. Do not skip values (time periods), even if there are no values.

These things help us on keeping our charts informative and credible.

Dashboarding

In our context, a dashboard is a collection of different charts . Generally, we use charts of different categories (comparison, relationship etc ) to create a dashboard and thus it becomes important to stay consistent and relatable to the audience. Your dashboard’s purpose is to help guide the reader’s eye through more than one visualization, tell the story of each insight, and reveal how they’re connected. The more you employ a better dashboard design, your users will discover what’s happening, why and what’s most important. Take into account how you’re guiding their eyes across the dashboard. Are you showing the user where to look next?

Guide the user: Don’t leave people high and dry without guidance on how to use visualization. Try swapping a filter title with explicit language directions about how to navigate.

Rule of three: Don’t make a lot of important information compete for attention. Most of the time, more than three visualizations on one dashboard is too many.

In Conclusion

Great visualizations will not only help you understand more about your data, but they’ll also offer faster, more meaningful answers, and even inspire others to ask and answer new questions.

References :

https://eazybi.com/blog/data-visualization-and-chart-types
https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/Data-Ink_Ratio