What Is the Purpose of Your Chart?
Applying basic design principles, Part 5: Defining what you want to accomplish with your visualization
This is the fifth in a series of articles that illustrate how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous article focused on how your audience can influence your chart design. Here, we’ll dig deeper into the chart as a method of communication, and the different purposes that it can serve.
Once you understand the audience and broader context for a visualization, it is time to dig deeper into the purpose of the visualization itself. What goals is it helping you to achieve? What are you trying to communicate? What tasks does your user need to accomplish by using this graph?
What are your core objectives?
A visualization can serve many purposes. I like to break these down into three core objectives, each of which influences your design choices in different ways. A clear understanding of your purpose will guide all of the decisions that you make when designing your chart.¹
Explore: Allow a user to navigate the data
- Represent a complicated system or information space
- Help someone to see connections and relationships
