Introduction:

• It’s too easy today to generate tables, charts, graphs. There were times when people did illustrations by hand, which meant you had to think before committing pen to paper.
• Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter down to the most important bits.
• Bad graphs are everywhere
• Anyone can put some data into a graphing application and create a graph

Importance of context:

• Explorartory vs Explainatory
• To whom are we communicating ?
  • Identifying the decision maker is one way of narrowing your audience.
• What do we want the audience to know or do ?
  • Focus on discussion around action and prompt them to make a decision
  • Using Verbs for the same
• How can you use data to help make your point?
  • Amount of control vs level of detail
  • Live Presentation
    • Practice makes perfect
    • Able to respond to user cues
  • Written Doc
  • Slidement
• What tone do you want your communication to set?
• What data is available that will help make my point?
• Consulting for context
  • What background information is relevant or essential?
  • Who is the audience or decision maker? What do we know about them?
  • What biases does our audience have that might make them supportive of or resistant to our message?
  • What data is available that would strengthen our case? Is our audi- ence familiar with this data, or is it new?
  • Where are the risks: what factors could weaken our case and do we need to proactively address them?
  • What would a successful outcome look like?
  • If you only had a limited amount of time or a single sentence to tell your audience what they need to know, what would you say?
• 3 minute story and a big idea for precise communication
  • Big Idea
    • It must articulate your unique point of view
    • It must convey what’s at stake
    • It must be a complete sentence
• For planning the content use storyboarding
  • Issue
  • Pre analysis
  • Ideas for overcoming the issue
  • Post analysis
  • Recommendation
• Choosing an Effective Visual:
  • Simple text
    • When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate suse the numbers directly
    • If you have two numbers, you can represent the change between orginal and new value
  • Tables
    • Never to use it in live presentation
    • Use light or minimal borders to make data standout
    • Interact with our verbal system
  • Heatmap
    • Color saturation
  • Chart vs Graph
  • Graphs
    • Interact with our visual system
    • Points
      • Scatterplot
    • Lines
      • Plot continuous Data/data over time
      • Focus is on relative position in space so no need to start with 0 baseline
      • Types
        • Standard Line Graph
        • Slopegraph
          • Two points of comparison and want to quickly show relative increases and decreases or differences across various categories between the two data points.
    • Bars
      • Show categorical data
      • Start with a 0 baseline
      • If you want your audience to focus on big‐picture trends, think about preserving the axis but deemphasizing it by making it grey.
      • If the specific numerical values are important, it may be bet- ter to label the data points directly. Omit the axis to avoid the inclusion of redundant information
      • Types
        • Vertical (Single or multi series)
        • Stacked vertical bar
          • Compare totals across categories and see the subcomponent pieces within a given category.
        • Waterfall
          • Transitions with ins and outs
        • Horizontal bar
          • Logical ordering of categories. Show most important category at top and rest in decrasing order or vice versa
        • Stacked horizontal bar
          • Likert scale
          • Subcomponent pieces can be structured to show either absolute values or sum to 100%. Showing sum as 100% usually works better
    • Area
      • Not too great for human eyes
      • Except for when to visualize numbers greatly vast magnitude
      • Types
        • Square Area Graphs
  • Infographic
  • What to avoid ?
    • Pie Charts
      • Replace with horizontal chart
    • Donut Charts
    • 3D Charts
    • Secondary y-axis
      • Instead,label the data points that belong on y-axis directly with focus on the data points
      • Pull the graphs apart vertically and have separate y‐axis for each (both along the left) but leverage the same x‐axis across both with focus on the trend than the numbers
      • Link the axis to the data to be read against it through the use of color
  • What is the right graph for my situation? Whatever will be easiest for your audience to read.
• Clutter is your enemy:
  • Identify everything that isn’t adding informative value
  • Cognitive load
    • As designers of information, we want to be smart about how we use our audience’s brain power.