Well, truth be told, Bad to a Little Better.
As some may know, Andy Kriebel and Andy Cotgreave recently started and shared a new series called Make over Monday, where they (And anyone in wants to participate) take a not so great visualization and, you guessed it, Make it over. If you are not familiar with it, please check out either of their blogs for more details, everyone is able to participate.
Andy Kriebel : http://vizwiz.blogspot.com/p/makeover-monday-challenges.html
Andy Cotgreave: http://gravyanecdote.com/
What is great about this series, is it gives us an opportunity to share our designs/makeovers with the community. To share our take on the subject. And what is really awesome, is that we can get feedback on our design (What worked and what didn't). Last week, the topic viz was "Are Consumers Bored with Technology", a visualization put together by Business Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-getting-tired-of-buying-new-devices-2016-1?r=UK&IR=T)
Here is the original
I won't go into what I think is wrong with this, since the point of this series is to discuss my personal failures with design, and the iterations I made.
So, upon seeing this, I realized the story to tell was the decline in consumers intent to purchase devices from 2015 to 2016.
Here is my original design/makeover (Failure).
This is where I started. At first, I was happy with this, because it portrayed the information I wanted it to, But there was a lot of problems. Though it does portray the information, it just doesn't look good. You have to really pay attention to get that the last metric in the pane is the Difference between the two years. In addition, there are simply too many colors. It distracts the user from the actual story. And the story, is what is most important.
Back to the drawing board.
I thought more about the story, and realized that I needed clearly show the decline between the two years. So I decided that a Slope graph would be appropriate, as it would allow users to easily see the downward trends. I also decided to focus in one the products that were in decline, since that was the center point of the article. To do this, I decided to use two colors, Red and Grey. These colors easily contrast, and allows the red to "Pop out" and say, "Hey look at me", while letting the Grey fade into the background. Color are very important, and can make or break your design.
Take two
This is getting a little better. It's much easier to see the dramatic decrease in intent to purchase from 2015 to 2016. And the colors really draw the users in to the products in decline. But something is still lacking. I want to really highlight those products that declined. And, I lost the ability to show the Difference, since my labels are now being used for the actual values. So what I decided to do was replace the 2015 and 2016 labels, with the Difference on the end of each line. Then I created another viz (Simple conditional formatted crosstab) that would serve to show the individual values. It also allowed me to add more red, further emphasizing the declining products.
Take three
This is ok, at best. But the scale is all wrong. The top chart is far too long, and it really takes over the whole viz. Also I still feel like the I'm not emphasizing the declining products enough. I want the user to look at this, and in less than a second say, "What the hell is happening there?". As I looked at it, I thought, what about if I remove the Difference from Slope label, and instead use it in a bar graph? It would give me an additional chart to shrink up the slope graph, I could add more color, and it would really show just how far down these products dropped (Even a little change could result in millions of dollars lost).
Take four
I'm happy with this design. When I look at it, my eyes are immediately drawn to red. I see that products the products that were in decline, and how much they fell. At this point, this was my final product. Of course I needed to add a title, and some background information, but this is body I wanted to share. This was the story I wanted to tell. So once I added in a few details, I posted it on Twitter, and asked for feedback/suggestions.
The best advice I can give, DON'T BE SCARED TO PUBLISH YOUR WORK AND ASK FOR FEEDBACK!
We are apart of amazing community. Everyone that I have ever interacted with has been nothing but kind and helpful. No one has ever told me, "Rody, that looks terrible, you should stop being a Data Analyst". We just aren't that kind of community. Instead what you will get is helpful suggestions and insights from individuals who have been doing this a long time, and have a lot to teach,
After I published it online, Matt Francis quickly jumped in and said this.
"Looks good, try removing the vertical lines between the categories to give it a cleaner look."
Ahhh! How did I not catch that! When I originally put it together, I thought the vertical lines would help serve to "Group" the products. That way it would appear to blend together. However, as Matt later pointed out
"In your case you have one bar per category, if you had several then u'd use the line as a grouping."
Having the bar chart, was actually helping to separate the products. And all the verticals lines were doing, was distracting the user from the data. Edward Tufte describes this as "Chart Junk". Anything that is not supporting the visualization, is hurting it.
Take five (My finished product)
Much cleaner! By removing the vertical lines, all that was left was the data. I accomplished my goal, and told the story I wanted to tell. I'm happy with this result.
So what did I learn from this experience?
First designs are rarely any good. But that is ok. Sometimes you have to build and look at it for a minute, before you realize how bad it is. As long as you are making efforts to improve it through iterations, you're gonna be ok.
Borders (Verticals/Horizontal Lines) can hurt your design if they are not adding value. Think about the elements on the Dashboard, and whether or not they are helping to tell the story, if they aren't, remove them all together.
The thing I am reminded of everyday, I am apart of the most amazing community of people in the world. Even if you think your design isn't great, share it. you would be amazed at what you could learn.
Best regards,
Rody Zakovich
0 Comment