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What Makes A Good Visualization

The document discusses key principles for creating effective data visualizations, including: 1. Exploratory visualizations are for finding insights in the data and don't need to be polished, while explanatory visualizations communicate results to others and should be accurate, insightful and visually appealing. 2. The five steps of data analysis are extract, clean, explore, analyze, and share, with exploratory visuals used in cleaning and exploring, and both exploratory and explanatory visuals used in analyzing and sharing. 3. Good visualizations clearly convey the intended message without being misleading, while bad visualizations fail to do so or are misleading.

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Yasser Isteitieh
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21 views

What Makes A Good Visualization

The document discusses key principles for creating effective data visualizations, including: 1. Exploratory visualizations are for finding insights in the data and don't need to be polished, while explanatory visualizations communicate results to others and should be accurate, insightful and visually appealing. 2. The five steps of data analysis are extract, clean, explore, analyze, and share, with exploratory visuals used in cleaning and exploring, and both exploratory and explanatory visuals used in analyzing and sharing. 3. Good visualizations clearly convey the intended message without being misleading, while bad visualizations fail to do so or are misleading.

Uploaded by

Yasser Isteitieh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Data Visualization, Reporting and

Dashboards

Session 2: What makes a


good Visualization
Reasons for creating visuals
using data
1. Exploratory analysis is done when you are searching for insights. These
visualizations don't need to be perfect. You are using plots to find insights, but
they don't need to be aesthetically appealing. You are the consumer of these
plots, and you need to be able to find the answer to your questions from these
plots.

2. Explanatory analysis is done when you are providing your results for others. These
visualizations need to provide you the emphasis necessary to convey your
message. They should be accurate, insightful, and visually appealing.
The data analysis
process
The five steps consists of :
1. Extract - Obtain the data from a spreadsheet, SQL, the web,
etc.

2. Clean - Here we could use exploratory visuals.

3. Explore - Here we use exploratory visuals.

4. Analyze - Here we might use either exploratory or explanatory


visuals.

5. Share - Here is where explanatory visuals live.


Bad Visuals

• Visuals can be bad if they:


1. Don't convey the message.
2. Are misleading.
• This seems straightforward, but often visuals are created that do one or both
unintentionally.
Visual Encoding

• Experts and researchers have determined the types of visual patterns that allow humans to best
understand certain information.

• Humans can best understand data encoded with positional changes (differences in x- and y-
position as we see with scatterplots) and length changes (differences in box heights as we see with
bar charts and histograms).

• Humans struggle with understanding data encoded with color hue changes (as are unfortunately
commonly used as an additional variable encoding in scatter plots - we'll study this in upcoming
concepts) and area changes (as we see in pie charts, which often makes them not the best plot
choice).
Chart Junk

It refers to all visual elements in charts and graphs


that are not necessary to comprehend the
information represented on the graph or that
distract the viewer from this information. [Wikipedia]
Data-to-ink Ratio
• The data-ink ratio is directly related to the idea of chart junk.

• The more of the ink in your visual that is related to conveying the message in the data, the
better.

• Limiting chart junk increases the data-ink ratio.


Data-to-ink Ratio
Design Integrity

• It is key that when you build plots you maintain


integrity for the underlying data.
• One of the main ways discussed here for looking at
data integrity was with the lie factor.
Lie Factor
• Lie factor depicts the degree to which a visualization distorts
or misrepresents the data values being plotted. It is
calculated in the following way:

• The delta symbol (Δ) stands for difference or change.

• In words, the lie factor is the relative change shown in the


graphic divided by the actual relative change in the data.
Ideally, the lie factor should be 1: any other value means that
there is some mismatch in the ratio of depicted change to
actual change
The number of pixels related to the largest
image is 79,000 and 16,500 for the
smallest. The percentage change is 27% to
12%. So, the lie factor is calculated as:
Do we need colors here?
Do we need colors here?
Color Blindness

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