In this post, I list the specific chart types that, in my experience, stump audiences most often (including, sometimes, senior executives).

When I’m chatting with other chart creators, it sometimes feels like there are two different groups that live in two completely different worlds:

The first world is populated by those who create charts for relatively data-savvy audiences. In this world, chart types like scatterplots and histograms are “basic” chart types that everyone knows how to read.

The second world is populated by those who regularly create charts for “non-data” audiences who often struggle with anything other than simple bar, line, or pie charts.

You might have seen this brilliant piece of viral marketing from cybersecurity firm Hive Systems, that seems to pop up every year in my social media feeds. While it's a great piece of content marketing, the color choices leave a few things to be desired, IMHO, which I discuss in this blog post.

I’ve seen the following scenario play out many times in the organizations with which I work:

A chart creator decides to “get creative” by using a histogram, connected scatterplot, ribbon chart or some other chart type that they know to be unfamiliar to the audience. They could have used a simpler, more familiar chart type to say the same things about the data, but they wanted to “challenge the audience,” or “teach them new chart-reading skills.”

The chart then goes over like a lead balloon, however. The audience misreads the chart, skips reading it altogether, or gets annoyed with the chart creator, who then feels bitter, believing their audience to be intellectually lazy or just dumb.