3 Must Know Data Visualization Principles

Damien Azzopardi on 2022-05-09

Your data has a story to tell

✍︎ Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Introduction
There is a story in your data. You, the analyst, probably already know what that story is. But how do you get the word out? And
most importantly, how do you ensure that your audience will take concrete actions based on your narrative? Data Visualization is
the final step of your analytical journey, the one that will help you tell that story and convert it into decisive measures.

But telling a compelling story is no easy task. Like any other type of communication, the key challenge in Data Visualization is to
identify which elements in your message are signal — the information you want to communicate, and which are noise —
unnecessary information polluting your message.
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With that in mind, your main goal is to present content to your audience in a way that highlights what's important, eliminating
any distractions.

You've probably already spent a lot of time understanding, cleaning, and modeling your data to reach a conclusion worth sharing.
So don't let this final step get in the way of properly communicating your key insights.

Memory in Data Visualization

When was the last time you attended a presentation, looked at a series of charts, and thought: 'I have no idea what I should be
looking at'? It all has to do with the way your memory works.

✍︎ The three types of memory 🧠

Iconic memory is really fast. The information that goes through your iconic memory only lasts for a fraction of a second. Iconic
memory is basically a flash storage of a visual stimulus, that will decide if your brain discards it or transfers it onto your short-
term memory.

While the information in your short-term memory can last for a few minutes, its capacity is limited. Your short-term memory
can only simultaneously process a limited amount of data and quickly be saturated. Throw too much information at your audience
at the same time, and this is where you'll lose their focus.

When information leaves your short-term memory, your brain either loses it forever or forwards it into your long-term memory,
where it will store that information for a longer period.

When telling your story, you want to leverage your audience's iconic memory as much as possible and save them from processing
the data in their limited short-term memory.
So, don't blame yourself the next time you feel lost during your upcoming colleague's presentation. Blame your short-term
memory instead.

1. Preattentive Attributes
Preattentive attributes are visual characteristics that trigger your brain to process information fast, without your conscious
action. And it all happens within your iconic memory.

While it might look like a fuzzy concept at first, the power of these preattentive attributes is relatively easy to demonstrate. To do
so, look at the sequence below and count how many times the number 9 appears.

✍︎ Serial processing

The correct answer is five. But in this example, there's no visual indication you can rely on to help you reach this conclusion. You
had to scan each number one by one to see if it was a 9 or not.

Let's repeat the same exercise with the exact same sequence, but now, let's see what happens when we make a single visual
change.

✍︎ Preattentive processing

Because we changed the color intensity of these numbers, they now clearly stand out. Suddenly, there are five 9s in front of you.
This is preattentive processing and iconic memory in action.

Now let's see how to integrate this concept in Data Visualization, using the following example, analyzing the correlation between
the number of orders and sales.
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Note how, without any visual indication, you are left to process all the information by yourself. You might be able to find an
insight on your own from this chart, but you'll have to make good use of your short-term memory for that, which will take time.

Now check out what happens when we include preattentive attributes to the same graph.

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By modifying the color hue of these four data points, you make them stand out, and you now clearly see a pattern you might
have missed in the previous example.

Preattentive processing is a very powerful concept. Using it correctly in Data Visualization makes your audience see what you
want them to see before they even realize they're seeing it.

2. Time to Insight
The time to insight corresponds to the time it takes to draw insights from a graph or a visualization. The lower, the better. You
want your audience to get insights from a visualization as quickly as possible.

Pie charts are an excellent example to illustrate this concept, and while they are still widely used, you really want to stay away
from them.

✍︎ High time to insight 📈

Using the pie chart example above, you can notice that the time it takes to get insights from this type of chart is very high. You
need to go back and forth between the slices and the legend to understand it. Here, you're making your audience work hard to get
your message.

Now let's look at how we could improve it and reduce the time to insight.
 ✍︎ Time to insight reduced 📉
Convert your visualization to a simple horizontal bar chart, and voila! Your eyes naturally scan down through each country. They
don't need to move around in the chart as they did with the previous example.

Want to focus your audience's attention on the top-performing European market? You can use the preattentive attribute concepts
seen above to reduce the time to insight even more.

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Your audience is now starting to see your story. And it took them only a few seconds for that.

3. Data-Ink Ratio
 The larger the share of a graphic’s ink devoted to data, the better — Edward Tufte

Your graphs are made of ink. Some of this ink represents what's important, and some doesn’t. Edward Tufte's book, The Visual
Display of Quantitative Information, introduces the data-ink ratio as a concept that says you should dedicate as much ink as
possible to the data. In other words, you should eliminate all the unnecessary information distracting your audience from the
message you're trying to convey.

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To maximize your data-ink ratio in your graphs, you should ask yourself, 'Would the data suffer any loss if this were eliminated?'
If the answer is 'no,' get rid of it.

Take a moment to look at the combo line chart below, measuring two critical mobile app performance metrics.

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Let's see how to maximize the data-ink ratio in just a few steps.
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By applying a set of simple actions, you have eliminated all the noise in this graph and reduced your audience's cognitive load.
Your message is now hitting them faster.

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Conclusion
As an Analyst, you might think that your role stops at discovering the story that hides in your data. But ensuring your story sticks
with your audience will often make the difference between a good and a great Analyst. To do so, try to make good use of these
three concepts:

1. Help your audience focus on your story's essential takeaways by leveraging their iconic memory through the use of
preattentive attributes.
 2. Always ask yourself, 'how much time does it take to draw insights for this chart?' 'Could it be improved?' Most of the time,
the answer is yes. So keep it simple.
3. Keep only the data essential to your message and eliminate the rest. Not all the information in your visualizations is equally
important. Sometimes, less is more.

These simple concepts will help you create lean and clean visuals that will make your audience work less hard to get the insights
you want to communicate and convert your story to concrete actions.

If you had to remember just one thing from the above, here's the most important takeaway:

Above all else show the data — Edward Tufte

All images unless otherwise noted are by the author.

References
S. Few, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten (2nd ed.) (2012) Analytics Press

N. C. Knaflic, Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals (1st ed.) (2015), Wiley

E. R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.) (2001), Graphics Press