October 17, 2004
Elegance Through Simplicity
"By keeping goals in mind and design simple, you can achieve elegant, easily understandable data presentations."
Experts in any domain tend to lose awareness of the individual steps that they go through to produce their work. As their expertise grows and deepens over time, it becomes second nature, intuitive, and automatic. Ask them to break the process down for you and they might just stare blankly, genuinely befuddled. They know how to do it, but that knowledge has become so intimately integrated into their minds and bodies, they can no longer articulate the process. In this article, I'll try to save you some time and trouble by revealing the steps I take when designing data presentations.
...
Strive to maintain consistency of appearance in a data presentation, except when the data itself differs in meaning or importance and visual differences can be used to communicate differences in the data. One common mistake is the use of color variations for bars that are part of the same data set, which is entirely unnecessary. The left-hand graph in Figure 4 encodes each bar as a different color, but we already know that each bar represents a different country by its position along the horizontal axis and the corresponding labels. Different colors are not only unnecessary in this graph, but they also make it more difficult to see the six bars as a single related data set and discern the relationships among the bars as they range from the largest value to the smallest.
Effective data presentations are rooted in a constant awareness of the goal, which is to communicate — not to entertain or impress. Keep this goal in mind whenever you design data presentations and pursue it using the principles and practices that I've introduced in this series of articles. Always ask yourself, "Does this design present the data and its message clearly?" If the information is worth presenting, it is worth presenting well."
Stephen Few is the founder of Perceptual Edge, a consulting firm that specializes in data presentation. His new book, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, is now available from Analytics Press.
(Stephen Few - Intelligent enterprise Magazine) - courtesy of john rhodes
posted by
Robin Good
on Sunday, October 17 2004
Thursday, December 1 2005
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2004/10/17/elegance_through_simplicity.htm
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