Data visualization

Wednesday, October 4, 2023 10:51 AM

1. Three first questions before visualizing any data for the audience Cultural color connotations
- Who: To whom are you communicating?
=> narrow the target audience (avoid general terms like internal or external stakeholders) When picking colors for communications to international audiences, it may be important to consider
- What do you want the audience to know? the connotations colors have in other cultures.
=>
- How can you use the data to make your point? informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours ‐in‐cultures.

2. 3-minutes story Step to create chart in Exercise 4.2

An example: Leveraging the summer learning program on science for potential investor to fund your project Axis Labels That Don't Block Plotted Data - Peltier Tech
- Demonstrate the success of the program (just 40% of students before enrolling the science course felt just "OK" about
science, this figure turned to 70% after the program) => the pilot summer program was successful at improving student's - Create additional column named Label => set negative number for positive values and vice
perceptions of science => bc of this success we offer continuing the program versa (the same value)

3. Storyboarding (Establish structure for the communication. It is a visual outline of the content we plan to create)

When it comes to storyboarding, DON’T START WITH PRESENTATION SOFTWARE (ppt). As it USUALLY ends up with
massive presentation deck that says nothing effectively. Additionally, it cause to FORM AN ATTACHMENT => even if we
know what we’ve created isn’t exactly on the mark or should be changed or eliminated, we are sometimes resistant to
doing so because of the work we’ve already put in to get it to where it is.

I - TYPES OF VISUALS
1. Simple text
- When you have just one or two numbers to share and making it as prominent as possible -and a few supportive words to
clearly make your points

Any time you reduce from multiple numbers down to a single one—think about what context may be lost in doing so.

E.g., when describing the percentage of stay-at-home moms over 1970-2012. Considering:
* “The number of children having a traditional stay‐at‐home mom decreased more than 50% between 1970 and 2012.”,
and - Create bar chart
* "20% of children had a traditional stay‐at‐home mom in 2012, compared to 41% in 1970" - Delete Y-axis category
- Series Options: Set Series Overlap: 100%, Gap with: 30%
=> in this case, using actual magnitude of the numbers (20% and 41%) is more helpful to interpreting and understanding - Right click Series 2 (Label) => add Data Label => Format data label => set Label Position to Inside
the change. Base => Label Contains: Category name (bo chon Value)
- Format No Fill, no Borders for bar charts display Label column
2. Tables

TABLE DESIGNS (From Show me the numbers - Stephen Few)

4.b.1 Delineating columns and rows

Rules and Grids

• For better read

• Highlighting the Total column

• Highlight particular set of data (using both row and column grids)

Fill color
• Using Zebra striping (light gray) on alternating rows to aid the scanning across long rows in data

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 4.b.2 Formatting text

• Orientation: Horizontal from left to right

• Alignment
- Numbers that represent quantitative values, as opposed to those that are merely identifiers (e.g., customer numbers),
should always be aligned to THE RIGHT
- Text (except: numbers nor dates) works best to aligned to the LEFT
- How dates are aligned does not matter, but keep the numbers of digits in each part of the data (i.e., month, day, year)
consistent

• Decimal digits

How many digits would be needed? The answer depends on the message we're trying to communicate

In this case, 2-digits decimal would be significant

=> Whole percentages (i.e., no decimal digits) would not differentiate the relative contributions or rank of the Middle East
and Africa regions, and two decimal digits would provide more detail than necessary, so one decimal digit would probably
work best.

• Fonts

c. Slopegraph: Use to quickly show the relative increase or decrease trend or the differences across various categories
between 2 points of data

CHART TYPES TO BE AVOIDED : Pie chart, Donut chart, 3D, secondary y-axes charts

Pie charts are evil when segments are CLOSE IN SIZE => makes it hard to determine the biggest one.

(In this below example, the biggest one seems to be B but in fact A has the biggest proportion.)

INSTEAD: use horizontal bar chart (organized from the highest to the smallest or vice versa)

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 NEVER USE 3D : 3D skews our numbers, making them difficult or impossible to interpret or compare

Secondary y‐axis: generally not a good idea since it takes time to process the data and understand what we want to
deliver

INSTEAD:
1. Don’t show the y-axis, instead, label the data points that belong to this axis directly.
2.Pull the graphs apart vertically and have a separate y‐axis for each (both along the left) but leverage the same x‐axis
across both.

II - CLUTTER
1. USE OF CONTRAST

Clear contrast helps audience understand where to focus their attention.

AN EXAMPLE: Imagine you work for a U.S. retailer and want to understand how your customers feel about various dimensions
of their shopping experience in your store compared to your competitors. Then you want to create a visual to display the result
of your survey. You want to create a weighted performance index to summarize each category of interest as the original graph
below. A higher index indicates high performance and vice versa, a low index suggests poor performance.

=> ISSUES: so many things competing audience's attention. The "Our business" (blue diamond icon) is obscured by other data
points, making it so hard to compare with our competitors (fell to reach of purpose of the chart) => lack of contrast

► Consider an example of using strategic contrast

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 - In the revised chart, there are some changed points
+ al the numbers are rescaled to positive value rather than keep some negative values in the original scatterplot which
makes the audience confused. (This change works since we are more interested in the relative difference rather than the
absolute values) => CONSIDER WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE CHART (determine the absolute value or the trend would
be more focused)
+The "Our business" has been highlighted with blue color and the other competitors are presented all by grey.
+ The length of the bar show the level of performance.

With this design, it is easy to see two things quickly:

1. We can let our eyes scan across the blue bars to get a relative sense of how “Our business” is doing across the various
categories: we score high on Price and Convenience and lower on Relationship, possibly because we’re struggling when it
comes to Service and Selection, as evidenced by low scores in these areas.

2. Within a given category, we can compare the blue bar to the grey bars to see how our business is faring relative to
competitors: winning compared to the competition on Price, losing on Service and Selection.

III - PREATTENTIVE ATTRIBUTES

(Size, color, position on page, etc)

Preattentive attributes can be used to help (1) direct audience's attention and (2) create a visual hierarchy of
information.

1. Preattentive attributes in text

► Some attributes draw your eyes with greater or weaker force than others (for example, color and size are attention
grabbing, whereas italics achieve a milder emphasis)

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 2. Preattentive attributes in graphs

AN EXAMPLE: you're working for a car manufacturing. You are interested in understanding and sharing insight about the top
design concerns (measured as the number of concerns per 1,000 concerns) from customers for a particular vehicle.

==> No clues about what should pay attention to or what's important

► Use color to draw attention

► We can go one step further by, using the same visual by modified focus and text to lead audience's attention from macro
to the micro parts of the story

STEP-BY-STEP TO DETERMINE WHAT TO FOCUS AUDIENCE'S ATTENTION

Let's revisit the Ticket example

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 ► STEP 1: PUSH EVERYTHING TO THE BACKGROUND

► STEP 2: MAKE THE DATA STAND OUT

In this example, the Processed line is highlighted against the Received in order to draw emphasis to the fact the
number of processed ticket is fallen below the number of being received => thus, we need to employ additional
workforce.

► STEP 3: FOCUS AUDIENCE'S ATTENTION TO THE RIGHT POINT

In this example, we want to focus audience attention to the right hand side of the graph as the gap started to be widen.
Using preattentive attributes to quickly guild audience's direction to the points we want to emphasize (data markers,
numeric labels, etc)

 Too many data labels feel cluttered

☺ Determine which data markers and labels we preserve and which we eliminate

Brand colors: to leverage or not to leverage?

Some companies go through major undertakings to create their branding and associated color palette. The key here is to

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Some companies go through major undertakings to create their branding and associated color palette. The key here is to
identify one or maybe two brand-appropriate colors to use as "audience-look-here" cues and keep the rest of your color
palette relatively muted with shades of grey or black.

In some cases, it may make sense to deviate from brand colors entirely. EX: A client with a brand color is light shade of green,
you want to leverage the green color as the standout color, however, it simply wasn’t attention grabbing enough. There wasn’t
sufficient contrast, so the visuals I created had a washed‐out feel. When this is the case, you can use bold black to draw
attention when everything else is in shades of grey, or choose an entirely different color—just make sure it doesn’t clash with
the brand colors if they need to be shown together (for example, if the brand logo will be on each page of the slide deck you are
building).

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