Composing Pages with Charts

Guidelines

  • The essential question in data analysis is: "Compared to what"? To understand your data, you need to place it in a context.
  • Most interesting problems are essentially multivariate: there are a variety of factors that interact. Include many dimensions of data in your analysis.
  • "Follow your data" when you are analyzing by changing the display, the data, or the charts to show you new relationships as you try to understand what you are seeing.
  • A design strategy that is often effective is: "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand" (HCIL). Provide an overall chart that covers the problem space. You should try to use a multidimensional chart for the overview (e.g., scatter plot, Multiscape, ParaBox, Data Constellations, Map, Time Table). Use filtering and zooming to focus on a subset, then explore that subset by examining its details.

When you are designing a visual display of your data, consider these factors:

  • Show as much data as you can: a chart can comfortably accommodate one to two orders of magnitude more data than a spreadsheet can.
  • Extract data at the granularity of items that you want to understand. For example, if the raw data is transactions, aggregate to higher level entities (e.g., products, people, relationships).
  • First choose charts that directly reflect relationships you are interested in:
    • Characteristics of a field: Bar, Pie, Line Chart, Histogram
    • Interaction of two things: Scatter Plot, Multiscape
    • Subsets over multiple fields: ParaBox
    • Outliers over multiple fields: ParaBox
    • Interactions between multiple fields: Data Sheet, ParaBox
    • Relationships: Data Constellations
    • Events over time: Time Table
    • Geospatial data: Maps
    • Details about data or subsets (often used for the "details on demand"): Data Sheet
  • Increase the dimensionality of your analysis by combining multiple charts into a page. Selection and coloring increase the number of dimensions that can be correlated. Filtering provides drill down to focus on a subset. (See Visual Discovery for more details.)

Too many Charts on a Page?

Here are things to try if you find your Page to be unable to fit all of the charts you think you need:

  • Reexamine objective of the Page:
    • What questions/problems is it trying to address?
    • Are all charts needed in that Page?
    • Are there other Visuals that might be as good (or better) with less space usage?
  • Use multiple Pages
  • Use Data Hierarchies
  • Orient bars in Bar Charts sideways (except for time-related dimensions)
  • Reduce font sizes (especially titles)
  • Eliminate titles if redundant w/axes labels
  • Align filters in two columns on left and right or along left and bottom
  • Use Full Screen button (client tool only)

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