It’s unconfirmed that awful charts kill small mythical beings. But I’m pretty sure bad graphs are killing something at least as important as fairies.
I believe bad graphs kill ideas.
And ideas are one of the most important things we, the market research industry have. With the increased sophistication of cheap, easily available online tools; the collection and presentation of data is no longer the exclusive domain of market researchers. Anyone with an internet connection can do it relatively easily.
Our purpose?
If we’re no longer kings of collecting and presenting data, what do we actually bring to the table? Part of the answer lies in the clever things we do with numbers—weighting, sampling theory, conjoint analysis. But another part lies in the ideas we have, born out of understanding how human behavior intersects with business.
One of the most important challenges is communicating our ideas to the people who can act on them. There are lots of things we can do here, but one thing I’ve learnt over the past year is that the way we visualise data is of the utmost importance. A good graph can make the difference between someone thinking I understand this and I’m going to act on it and someone giving you the blank expression that tells you they’ve switched off and they’re going to let your ideas die by the wayside.
I’m not the only one
I don’t expect you to take my word for it. But I’m not the first person to come to this conclusion. History is rich with examples of graphs that made a difference.
Let’s take Florence Nightingale—nurse, Lady with the Lamp, social reformist, and it turns out, producer of wonderful data visualisations. Nightingale produced a number of booklets highlighting the plight of soldiers fighting in the Crimean war. One of Nightingale’s most famous diagrams was a polar area pie chart, or Nightingale’s Rose—basically a pie chart where the slices extend outward based on their values, making comparisons visceral rather than abstract. It clearly shows that many more soldiers were dying of disease than being wounded by the enemy. For anyone in the army at that time, this diagram must have provided a strong reason to do something about the unhygienic conditions in army hospitals.
And producing good data visualisations doesn’t require you to be a master artist. There’s been a massive buzz around infographics over the past few years. This has led to a number of great websites like Flowing Data and Information is Beautiful. If books are more your thing, I wholeheartedly recommend the works of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. There’s also a range of tools that can help—vector graphics packages like Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape are great, and there are specialist tools like Processing, R, Gephi and Tableau that can be used to wonderful effect.
Is this the best way to put my idea across?
If you think ideas are important—and worth fighting for—then surely we owe it to ourselves (or at least to our clients) to give them the best chance of being heard. Next time you’re looking at a PowerPoint slide and you’re about to use yet another templated graph, it might be worth pausing.
Is this really the best way to get people to buy into my idea?