Note from Stephanie: I asked Sheila to write this post because I still get tons of questions from readers about how to take the design I recommend for data visualization and apply it to survey design. I’m not a survey expert, but Sheila is! Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, a…
So long as we are going to write reports, we might as well make them heavy on the visuals and do everything in our power to make the report easy to navigate, especially in a mobile reading culture. There are lots of ways to do this but one of my…
I have so much money in the bank I’m going to give away my number one reporting time saving secret (HAHAHAHAH not at all! I’m giving it away because I love you and I want to make your life easier). This is how you link Excel to your other reporting…
Folks, I’ve been discussing dashboards forever. I’ve consulted with dozens and dozens of clients on dashboards. And through all of that experience, I’ve discovered that dashboards kind of suck. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for a succinct complication of performance on key indicators. It sure beats a…
Last time Vidhya and I posted on this topic, we addressed how the use of color to visualize individuals can do more harm than good. This time Vidhya joins me again to talk about poverty and opportunity. Organizations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area community identified and started tracking indicators…
This is the hardest part of design to get right. It’s what differentiates sloppy, weak design from that which looks tight. It’s the use of a grid. Arrangement matters. It’s the sort of thing that gets talked about in design workshops, but people tend to get so caught up by…
Nicole contacted me with an email subject line: Thank you for the Data Viz Checklist! and she said she’d been using the checklist to overhaul some of her organization’s data visualizations. I’ve invited her here to showcase her before and afters. I’m Nicole Huggett and I recently transitioned…
The simplest way to show many types of data is through a column or bar chart, ordered greatest to least. These will work just fine, most of the time. When do they fall short? Well, when the values are all high, such as in the 80-90% range (out of 100%). Then…
Dudes, the State of the Union is my Superbowl. I look forward to this event like some people anticipate the Oscars. This is my deal. Why? Because the enhanced version of the SOTU features a data-based slideshow, a perfect study in how graphics can help underscore a point. And, as…
Last week I launched a challenge to redesign financial info from the Gates Foundation annual report. I was looking for entries that made the data more engaging than a table, matched the level of design of the rest of an annual report, and still reported each element originally presented…
