I often read that you should make your charts “memorable”. Well, I’m not sure if this is a good advice, specially when people use “memorable” and “professional-looking” in the same sentence.
It’s OK if you are a graphic designer and you want to spend some time crafting an unique chart that draws the attention of the casual reader. For the rest of us, simple mortals, who just need to make those 300 charts before the end of the day, crafting a chart and make it memorable is a laughable idea.
In business visualization, “memorable” can only mean two things:
- the chart makes a good use of the working memory and
- the chart is very efficient at producing insights, and that leads to better, memorable decisions.
Here is a memorable chart.
Suppose I’m testing a new ad in a small market. The outlier show that the ad is working pretty well. Now I can test it in larger markets. Do I need a “memorable”, “professional-looking chart?
There is nothing special about this chart, you didn’t spend hours perfecting its design. Just a clean and simple message.
Unfortunately, this is not what many people mean by “memorable”. They mean something that belongs to the realm of graphic design and that’s very unhelpful from a business point of view.
So, if you are making charts make your insights memorable. Make sure patterns, trends and outliers are clear and easily spotted and offer different views to explain and support the decision making.
Memorable charts? Forget about it.
Creativity is such a positive quality that it is almost painful to argue that you shouldn’t try to be creative when making charts. But you shouldn’t. Really.
If you are too creative and the users can’t understand the chart in a few seconds they will dismiss it as useless. If you break basic conventions (time series in a horizontal axis, from left to right) users will have a hard time trying to figure out what the chart really mean. If you add 3D and other gratuitous verbiage you will obscure, truncate and distort your message.
Use creativity to improve your communication skills. Play with colors to emphasize your arguments. Show several charts instead of one. Show the data from different angles. But do everything using a familiar framework .
Try to enlarge the users comfort zone one step at a time. Remove 3D effects but keep the pie chart. Use pale colors instead of primary colors. Gray out grid lines. Reduce the number of pie charts. Add simple scatter plots. Make smaller charts. Do it slowly.
If you are not a graphic designer, if you work in a business environment, if your business needs go beyond a simple chart from time to time, then there is no room for creativity (or perhaps misplaced creativity). Your audience is busy. Respect that and make your charts as clear as possible.
How creative can we be when making charts for business? Share your thoughts below.
Photo credit: jef safi
(They don’t have to be explained.)
[Update: Sally Bigwood said it better here].
Regular readers know that English is not my mother language , but are kind enough to forgive me for my many mistakes.
I am always willing to learn. Today, while researching for an upcoming post, I came across an expression I never heard before: “spiffy charts”. I felt in love with “spiffy charts” the moment I read it. And I read it straight from the horse’s mouth (I mean Microsoft).
If you don’t know how to make a chart and are keen to preserve that blissful ignorance, I highly recommend Microsoft Office Online Training, specially the module Create a professional looking chart (regular readers also know how I love “professional-looking charts“). You’ll learn how to “customize your charts to make them more attractive, memorable, and effective“. This means useless charts.
So, let’s see how to turn a humdrum (this is a new word, too…) chart into a spiffy one. First, to declutter your chart remove grid lines:
As you know, grid lines are useless, specially if you don’t care about the data. I would remove the gray background and the border around the legend. And I’d give the chart a more descriptive title to tell the users what they are seeing, but that’s my personal taste.
Then you should remove the y-axis and add labels to each column, further “decluttering” the chart. At this point the readers start sighing for a nicely designed chart table.
Want to give your chart a little more “flair” and make them more “professional-looking”? Just add a gradient fill and a subtle shadow:
Now comes the spiffy part. Imagine that you have a 3D column chart with two series, and one obscures the other. What do you do? No, you can’t remove the stupid 3D effect (remember: you want to make t spiffy chart, not a humdrum one). Well, all you have to do is to change the order of the series:
Much better now, don’t you think? They accept that 3D charts “can be more attractive, but sometimes more difficult to read accurately” (surprise, surprise!). Apparently that’s a detail in the grand scheme of things. You are excused from making accurate charts if you are making professional-looking ones.
So, what else can you do to improve your chart? Ah, yes: the y-axis in a humdrum column chart always starts at zero. We don’t want that, do we?
Now you know how to make inaccurate, professional-looking, spiffy-with-a-flair marmalade charts. Please go straight to the kitchen, make some real marmalade and forget all you’ve learned about data visualization in the Microsoft Office Online Training.
(This is not a real Microsoft Office Training site, is it? It must be some kind of spoof site, and I fell for that trick. Right? Right?)
Sigh…
