To find the first installment of this series (oh so
long ago!), you can find it here
One
of the beauties of visualisation lies in the fact that it's up to eight times
easier for the human brain to understand data when it's presented visually as
opposed to as text. And the history of using graphics to explain and aid
understanding of relatively granular data is well documented; in fact, Andy
Cotgreave (Tableau's chief evangelist) has spoken and written a lot about this
aspect, and it's well worth checking out his (http://100yrsofbrinton.tumblr.com/, http://www.tableau.com/learn/webinars/100-years-data-visualization-its-time-stop-making-same-mistakes)
The second post in this series will explore
chart and visualisation types, and the things which these bring to style guides
in general. Further, I'll talk about examples of why this is a good practice to
promote within a business or a department, and some caveats on implementation.
If you're reading
this post, I'd imagine you realise how important the application of thinking
about the business questions to be answered using charts of visualisation
types, and how being aware of the purpose of these elements is what adds real
value and punch to the work that you produce.
The running message
along this entire series is the Cotgreave-ism "It depends" - Because it always, always,
always does.
It depends on so
many small variables that anyone who works in or with data should be aware of;
purpose, message, audience, data structure... All things which are limitations
and factors which help to chisel your block of wood into a meaningful piece of work.
What makes a guiding people on chart choices so
important?
Layout
and how charts should be explained when presenting is also in this sort of
guide in some cases, and this can be applied when thinking about how to create
better visuals and how to present them. An example of such a style guide (found
online) is here http://design.sunlightlabs.com/projects/Sunlight-StyleGuide-DataViz.pdf
A key aspect of the Sunlight Style Guide pack is the detail it goes into - and creating a cheat sheet,
document or even simply presenting a resource such as this helps to hone the
thinking process of not only yourself, but those around you as well.
A chart guideline
pack allows you to;
- Give direction to the designers, practitioners and analysts who you're working with
- Helps to encourage a unanimous "one company" facet to your business, especially if you're able to work with the marketing teams on this sort of thing (will expand on this shortly)
- Means that the charts created by your own firm and team are instantly recognisable
These can also be
applied as general points to consider when thinking of style guides in general,
but in the case of charts and visualisations, they're important in different
ways. Giving direction to the user will help them understand the purpose of different
charts and begin to give them an idea of when to use which charts, the message
which goes out when they're used and most importantly, offer tweaks to make
their key narrative pop. Much of this can be using colour, labelling and
annotation - but that's something we'll cover in another post.
Why is this good practice to promote within an
enterprise?
A lot of
this comes down to segmenting chart types - Not everyone has time to be a data
visualisation connoisseur, as much as they could/should; what a guide allows is
the understanding of how and when certain chart types or visualisation types
can be used.
For
instance, when can a pie chart be used?
It depends
What is
the purpose of using an area chart over a line chart?
It depends
The more
these questions develop, and different ways & approaches to visualising
data then the more handy the so-called "best practice" guides become;
particularly when you can answer specific "It depends" answers with
the confidence that what's being
I find
that this cheat sheet is an excellent place to start to understand how to "classify" charts.
The
bottom line is that the use cases within each enterprise, business and team
will be different. If a team has a particular need for charts over periods of
time for instance, then they naturally start at the line chart - but what other
ways of visualising the same message could they use?
Similarly,
if a team often shows part-to-whole relationships using a pie chart - how many
segments in their pie? Is there a more elegant solution which makes the message
instantly recognisable?
Things to Consider
This is
where we get to a few caveats - It's difficult to have this brainstorm without
a)
understanding the business you're in
b)
understanding the consumers of such a style guide or cheat sheet and
c) how
restrictive you want to be on the way that the users are being when creating
visualisations.
This
works it way into a key question when developing such a guide; how much
formatting & freedom do you wish the user to have when using these guides
templates?
Do you
want them to have a pre-build canvas, almost a wizard?
Do you
want a structure, and allow the user to fill in the blanks?
Or is it
simply a case of, here is our branding for the header, footer & banner -
Don't forget to add date/time of update.
How can this be developed & what could next steps
be?
And the
answer, once again, is it depends. But these are questions that a Centre of
Excellence can approach & answer - Particularly when thinking about
developing content & understanding it's roll in a wider roll out. (My go-to
Centre of Excellence gurus are the wonderful Pauls (Banoub & Chapman, as
well as the effervescent Fi Gordon - Hit them up for their experience as CoE
experts!)
My advice
from my very limited exposure & experience in this field is to think about
the question that is attempting to be answered. In every enterprise, no matter
how big or small, there are different needs & options to consider. For me,
if a presentation style guide exists within a marketing department or similar,
they can be the first port of call for design advice. Then, understand how the
tools for data visualisation (from Power BI, Tableau, Qlik or even Excel) are
being used - And how that can be improved.
Whilst
data visualisation can be a fluid process of inspiration & iteration,
corporations often need time to get used to such a way of thinking. Building
style guides which help users understand charts is simply invaluable - and can
be the stepping stone to thinking about data visualisation as a field to
consider as a whole.
Next time…
In the
next instalment (much, much sooner than this, I promise!) I'll be looking at iconography - and how this can be implemented as part of a style guide or
centre of excellence.
Please
reach out to me on thoughts, feedback and comments.
Thanks
for reading!
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