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January 10, 2021
Who is your audience?
What do you need them to know or do?
What is the best way to show the data you want to communicate?
That means we should take a discerning eye to the elements we allow on our page or screen and work to identify those things that are taking up brain power unnecessarily and remove them. Identifying and eliminating clutter is the focus of this chapter.
sight and memory that will act to frame up the importance of preattentive attributes like size, color, and position on page.
When it comes to the form and function of our data visualizations, we first want to think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease.
We explore decisions regarding the type of graph and ordering of data within the visual. We consider choices around what and how to emphasize and de-emphasize through use of color, thickness of lines, and relative size. We discuss alignment and positioning of components within the visuals and also the effective use of words to title, label, and annotate.
A story has a clear beginning, middle, and end; we discuss how this framework applies to and can be used when constructing business presentations.
understand the context, choose an appropriate visual display, identify and eliminate clutter, draw attention to where we want our audience to focus, think like a designer, and tell a story.
people err and think it’s OK to show exploratory analysis (simply present the data, all 100 oysters) when they should be showing explanatory
(taking the time to turn the data into information that can be consumed by an audience: the two pearls).
You are making your audience reopen all of the oysters!
Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.
whom are you communicating?
What do you want your audience to know or do?
How can you use data to help make your point?
Sometimes this means creating different communications for different audiences.
Identifying the decision maker
think about the relationship that you have with your audience
say. You should always want your audience to know or do something.
If you are the one analyzing and communicating the data, you likely know it best—you are a subject matter expert.
When it really isn’t appropriate to recommend an action explicitly, encourage discussion toward one.
We can think of the communication mechanism along a continuum, with live presentation at the left and a written document or email at the right,
Consider the level of control you have over how the information is consumed
Not all of the detail needs to be directly in the communication (the presentation or slide deck), because you, the subject matter expert, are there to answer any questions that arise over the course of the presentation
