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I first heard this objection from a client a number of years ago and it took me so off-guard that I just stared at them and then mumbled something about getting back to them on that. It just seemed like such a bizarre thing to say…
Since that time, I’ve heard this objection at least half a dozen times and have had a chance to formulate a couple of responses that usually convince dashboard users to rethink their “no red” policy.
Read moreYou may or may not be familiar with Marimekko charts, but they're popular in some fields, such as management consulting.
To see why I avoid using this chart type and what I use instead, check out my latest video (8 mins.).
Read moreI regularly hear complaints from dashboard creators that go something like this:
"My users consider dozens of metrics (or more) to be ‘KPIs’ and they want me to put them all on the dashboard."
"My users don’t understand that, among all the metrics that we could show on the dashboard, only three to five of them are truly important. The rest are just noise that distract from the truly important numbers, and so don’t belong on the dashboard."
Think about that for a second, though. Does it seem plausible that someone could run an entire team, department, or organization based on just five numbers?
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As these simple before and after examples show, direct labeling is a simple fix that can significantly improve the readability of your charts.
Read moreI recently saw people praising a chart from The European Correspondent on social media comparing the years of compulsory schooling for different European countries.
While it's certainly creative, when I tried to actually read the chart and spot the insights that were in the callouts, I had to work pretty hard, and some insights were difficult—or even impossible—to spot. In this blog post I critique the original design and propose a redesign that I think performs better.
Read moreOne of my pet peeves is dates in charts that are ambiguous, but the problem can easily by avoided by choosing good date formats.
Read moreProbably the most common way to show values on a map is the "colored-region" or "choropleth" method. I'm not the first to notice, however, that this method presents some potentially serious perceptual risks.
Read moreI was recently invited to deliver a webinar as part of JMP's great Statistically Speaking series. The webinar consisted of a 35-minute talk entitled "How to choose a chart type (it's trickier than you think)," followed by about 25 minutes of Q&A from a very engaged (and large) audience. The recording is now available to view online.
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I recently logged into the dashboard for my email list management app and noticed that the chart of my subscriber count over time suffered from several common design problems that made it unnecessarily hard to read and potentially misleading. In particular, the quantitative and time scales were less than ideal.
Check out this short (8-minute) video of me fixing these problems step-by-step:
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I recently recorded a video of me turning an “OK” chart into a great chart, step-by-step, to make it easier to interpret and to make key takeaways much more obvious.
Let me know if you agree or disagree with any of my changes!
When it comes to the maximum number of parts that should be shown as a pie chart, there are plenty of opinions floating around out there. In this article, I argue that the maximum number of slices depends on the situation and that, in certain situations, even a 30-slice (!) pie chart can be the best choice.
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An on-demand (pre-recorded) version of my flagship Practical Charts course will be available on June 25th! This self-paced video course consists of 6.5 hours of video in 44 lessons, and is available for 25% off during the pre-sale period (before June 25th).
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When should you use a bar chart instead of another chart type? Easy question, right?
As it turns out, choosing when to use a bar chart or another chart type is surprisingly complex. In fact, I’d argue that, in a way, bar charts are actually the most complex chart type. Sound strange? Then read this article…
Read moreI’ve recently seen a few comments on LinkedIn from people who don’t feel that it *ever* makes sense to use a stacked bar chart to show the breakdown of a single total. While relatively rare, there is a specific situation in which I think it *does* makes sense, though. What is that situation? Find out in my latest article...
Read moreCreating “simple” charts is much harder than it sounds. Telling a chart creator to “keep it simple” is like telling a student driver to “avoid traffic accidents.” Well, yes, obviously, but how, exactly, does one do that? While avoiding accidents sounds simple, it requires learning hundreds of rules of the road and days of training and practice.
Read moreI’ve been asked a number of times how I went about writing Practical Charts because it’s so, well, practical. This is a wonderful compliment to receive and so, as a cheap thank-you, here’s the story behind the book.
Read moreI recently had a great conversation with data visualization researcher and professor Enrico Bertini, about how surprisingly tricky it is to choose a chart type. Watch the video above (20 mins) to discover...
Why both the nature of the data AND the purpose of the chart must be considered when choosing a chart type
Why traditional "chart-type-chooser" diagrams and catalogues are often unhelpful, and even unreliable
Examples of more reliable and helpful chart-type-choosing decision trees from my Practical Charts course
Agree with what we said? Disagree? Great! Let us know in the comments below or in this LinkedIn thread.
You’ve probably seen “smoothed” or “curvy” line charts like this before. Some people like them and others definitely don’t. In this blog post, I explain when I think it’s okay to use smoothed line charts and when they should be avoided.
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You're looking at a chart and it contains a date labeled “10-02-2007.” What day is that, exactly? Feb. 10, 2007? Or October 2, 2007? How about “10-Feb-07”? Is that Feb. 10, 2007, or Feb. 7, 2010? To ensure that your chart readers know what the dates in your chart actually are, choose a date format in which:
The month is alphabetic (e.g., “Aug” instead of “08”)
The year is four digits (e.g., "2011" instead of "11")
As long as the date format that you choose checks both of those boxes, your readers will always interpret the dates in your charts correctly.
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You read that right: MORE Practical Charts! 😉
My first book, Practical Charts, covers about 30 common chart types that are familiar to most audiences, such as bar charts, line charts, and maps. More Practical Charts covers 20 additional, more "advanced" chart types that tend to be unfamiliar to audiences without scientific or technical backgrounds:
Box plots
Merged histograms
Overlapping histograms
Distribution line charts
Distribution heatmaps
Merged bar charts
Scatter plots
Colored-dot scatter plots
Bubble charts
Scatter plot matrices
Pareto charts
Heatmaps
Shape size charts
Overlapping cycles charts
Cyclical heatmaps
Cycle plots
Strip plots
Jittered strip plots
Merged strip plots
Histograms
If you have a technical or scientific background, you might assume that most people know how to read most of these chart types but, after working with thousands of chart creators in hundreds of organizations, I've realized that that's not the case (unfortunately). There's a reason why you rarely see these chart types in the mainstream media: editors know that many readers/viewers won't understand how to read them.
If, however, you do create charts for relatively data-savvy audiences, by all means, pick up a copy of More Practical Charts 🙂. The book will be published on January 16th, but you can pre-order your copy now to get it shipped to you on the publication date. It's relatively short (about 100 pages) and is priced at less than half the list price of Practical Charts.
Why split these 20 chart types out into a separate book? Well, a large fraction of my readers can't use these chart types because their audience would struggle too much to grasp them, or simply wouldn't be able to grasp them. I didn't want to force those chart creators to buy and read content from me that they'll never use in practice, so I packaged that content in a separate, optional companion book.
BTW...
Interested in taking my Practical Charts course and/or my Practical Dashboards course? Registration for my January live, online workshop is now open (but it's already 50% sold out and early-bird prices end January 8th, so don't wait too long if you plan on registering). I hope to see you (online) there!