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August 5, 2020
figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.
Tìm rạ những gì cần highlight
Nathan Yau’s book, Data Points.
This can be an uncomfortable space for many. Often, this discomfort seems to be driven by the belief that the audience knows better than the presenter and therefore should choose whether and how to act on the information presented. This assumption is false. If you are the one analyzing and communicating the data, you likely know it best—you are a subject matter expert. This puts you in a unique position to interpret the data and help lead people to understanding and action. In general, those communicating with data need to take a more confident stance when it comes to making specific
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Thưa thớt
Here are a few tips for getting comfortable with your material as you prepare for your presentation: Write out speaking notes with the important points you want to make with each slide. Practice what you want to say out loud to yourself: this ignites a different part of the brain to help you remember your talking points. It also forces you to articulate the transitions
slideument,
light a fire
Let’s recap who we have identified as our audience, what we need them to know and do, and the data that will help us make our case: Who: The budget committee that can approve funding for continuation of the summer learning program. What: The summer learning program on science was a success; please approve budget of $X to continue. How: Illustrate success with data collected through the survey conducted before and after the pilot program.
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 audience 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?
The fact that you have some numbers does not mean that you need a graph!
stay-at-home mom
Mẹ nội trợ
When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.
what is the point you are trying to make?
want the design
fade into
letting the data take center stage. Don’t let heavy borders or shading compete for attention. Instead, think of using light borders or simply white ...
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stands out,
Recommended reading For more on table design, check out Stephen Few’s book, Show Me the Numbers. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the design of tables, with discussion on the structural components of tables and best practices in table design.
Rat nhieu
bus fleet
Slopegraphs can be useful when you have two time periods or points of comparison
and want to quickly show relative increases and decreases or differences across various categories between the two data points.
You’ll note that a couple of other design changes were made in the remake of this visual as well.
When graphing data, a common decision to make is whether to preserve the axis labels or eliminate the axis and instead label the data points directly. In making this decision, consider the level of specificity needed. 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 better to label the data points directly.
The rule we’ve illustrated here is that bar charts must have a zero baseline.
hard-and-fast
pull
The horizontal bar chart is especially useful if your category names are long, as the text is written from left to right,
frequently misused. An infographic is simply a
Sự nghi ngơ
don’t use 3D! It does nothing good, and can actually do a whole lot of harm, as we see here with the
way it skews the visual perception of the numbers.
strip...
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to plot data
Don’t show the second y-axis. Instead, label the data points that belong on this axis directly.
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.
burden of cognitive load
Gánh nặng của tải nhận thức
Quá đáng
think about minimizing the perceived cognitive load
(to the extent that is reasonable and still allows you to get the information across) for your audience.
We’ll discuss six principles here: proximity, similarity, enclosure, closure, continuity,
Gần gủi
when looking at objects, our eyes seek the smoothest path and naturally create continuity in what we see even where it may not explicitly exist.
by lines (rather than similar color, size, or
The single change having the biggest impact in the preceding before-and-after example was the shift from center-aligned to left-justified text. In the original version, each block of text on the page is center-aligned. This does not create clean lines
Test
turn on the rulers or gridlines that are built into most programs. This will allow you to precisely align your elements to create a cleaner look and feel.
The table functionality built into most presentation applications can also be used as a makeshift brute-force method: create a table to give yourself guidelines for the placement of discrete elements. When you have everything lined up exactly like you want it, remove the table or make the table’s borders invisible so that all that is left is your perfectly arranged page.
White space I’ve never quite understood this phenomenon, but for some reason, people tend to fear white space on a page. I use “white space” to refer to blank space on the page. If your pages are blue, for example, this would be “blue space”—I’m not sure why they would be blue, but the use of color is a conversation we will have later. Perhaps you’ve heard this feedback before: “there is still some space left on that page, so let’s add something there,” or worse, “there is still some space left on that page, so let’s add more data.” No! Never add data just for the sake of adding data—only add
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White space in visual communication is as important as pauses in public speaking.
