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| Graphical Representation Series |
One of the most important aspects to stress in the context of graphical design is the purpose of graphical representations and the medium in which they are communicated. For example, one needs to differentiate between the graphics propagated on the various media channels that target the public consumption and potential customers (books, newspapers, articles in paper or paperless form, respectively blog posts and similar content) and graphics made for organizational use (reports, dashboards or presentations).
If the former graphics are supposed to back up a story, the reader being led into one direction or another, the author having the freedom of choosing the direction and the message, in the latter, unless the content is supposed to support, persuade or force a decision, the facts and data need to be presented in an equidistant manner, in a form that support insights, decision making or further inference. This applies to data professionals as well to the business users preparing the data.
Data visualization authors tend to use the title and subtitle to highlight in reports and dashboards the most important findings as per their perception, sometimes even stating the obvious. One of the issues with this approach is that the audience might just pick up the respective information without further looking at the chart, missing maybe more important facts. Just highlighting an element in the graphic or providing explanatory headlines is not storytelling, even if it helps in the process. Ideally, the data itself as depicted by the visuals should tell the story! Further information with storytelling character should be provided in the presentation of the data and taylored accordingly for the audience!
With a few exceptions, the information and decisions shouldn't be forced on the audience. There are so many such examples on the various social networks in which data analysts or other types of data professionals seem to imply this in the content they share and this is so wrong on many levels!
No matter how deep a data professional is involved into the business and no matter how extensive is his/her knowledge about the systems, data and processes, the business user and the manager are the closest to the business context and needs, while data professionals might not be aware of the full extent. This lack of context makes it challenging to interpret the trends depicted by the data, respectively to associate the changes observed in trends with decisions made or issues the business dealt with. When such knowledge is not available the data professional tends to extrapolate instead of identifying the chain of causality together with the business (and here annotation capabilities would help considerably).
Moreover, it falls on management's shoulders to decide which facts, data, metrics, KPIs and information are important for the organization. A data professional can make recommendations, can play with the data and communicate certain insights, gaps or courses of action, though the management decides what's important and how the respective information should be communicated! Overstepping the boundaries can easily lead to unnecessary conflict in which the data professional can easily lose, even if the facts are in his favor. It's enough to deal with missing or incorrect information for the whole story to fall apart.
It's true that some of the books on graphical design use various highlighting techniques in the explanation process, but they are intended for the readers to understand what the authors want to say. Unfortunately, there are also examples improperly used or authors' opinion diverge from the common sense. Independently of this, the data professional should develop own visual critical thinking and validate the techniques used against own judgement!
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