Skip to main content

Start here

When visualizing data, start by clearly outlining what you want it to convey. We recommend formulating this idea as a brief sentence, for instance, Last quarter campaign performance, to form the end goal for visualization.

Then, consider your audience and see how you can help them reach specific goals.

Consider your audience​

When people see your charts, what do you expect them to look for? What do you think they want to know from it?

Here're some guiding questions:

  • Who is your audience? Aim to learn all that you can about your audience's experience, so that visualization feels intuitive to them.
  • What metrics do they value? You might be working with a lot of data, but your audience usually wants to see only the relevant bits.
  • Will they need to look deeper? It might be a good idea to make your graphs interactive so that users can choose how much data they want to see.

Help them reach specific goals​

Depending on your data and the audience you're working with, data visualization can help you achieve three main goals: exploration, monitoring, and explanation. While some visualizations may cover all three, most focus on a single goal.

Exploration​

When your audience needs a tool that helps them find patterns and insights in data, a visualization that focuses on interactive exploration would be best. These exploratory tools often accompany other tools or can be a part of a workflow for extracting and transforming data.

Monitoring​

When your audience needs to analyze the performance or declare the state of something, a visualization focusing on monitoring would be best. Often an element of a dashboard, visualizations of this kind should emphasize leading indicators and show information that can promote making specific decisions.

Explanation​

A visualization that focuses on careful explanation would be best when your audience wants to see beyond a problem or situation and needs to understand why it's there. Such visualizations often need to be hand-crafted into a narrative that explains complex subjects.