Data Visualization Best Practices
By: Todor Staynov
Tags: UI Design, Best Practices, Charts, UX Design, Data Visualization

As my first main task here at Infragistics, I had to redesign our charts and make them consistent across our platforms, mainly our Dev tools and the Indigo.Design UI Kit. This meant I had an awful lot to learn about Data Visualization and its best practices. In the following article, I would like to share some of the most important things I’ve learned and implemented in my work on this task.

What is Data Visualization and why we need it?

You’ve probably already heard this, but as a Visual Designer I must remind you that:

Our brains process information visually 60,000 times faster than text and it takes only 13 milliseconds to recognize an image.

So, in essence, the sentence “A picture is worth a thousand words.” is even more true, now that is backed by scientific data.

And speaking about data — Data Visualization is the craft of turning raw information into easier to understand and perceive visuals, most commonly known as charts. Those can be described as the graphical representation of data with symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart. Charts can either stand alone as single data visualization or they can be combined in a dashboard with other charts.

So why do we need Data Visualization? Charts are used to tell a story. By representing raw data with a chart, or charts combined in a dashboard, you can make it more easily consumable. You can also find trends and discover important information, which can have an impact on your business. Hopefully, both can be positive :)

The User

As with everything that is designed nowadays The User must always be at the centre of the product being developed. And you should always keep in mind how you communicate your data and visualizations to different kinds of users. The most important rule of communication is to know your audience. We all have a different way of communicating when we talk to a business person compared to a technical person for example. Knowing what is important to the user when looking at and analysing your visualizations is paramount. Every visualization is telling a data story. To help get the message across you should keep in mind that your visualizations simplify complex data, tell your data story, and drive decision making.

Keeping it simple

I want to tell you about some of the established “rules” to follow when designing any type of data visualizations.

And with any kind of design this quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupery is also true about Data Visualization:

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing else to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.”

Since one of the main reasons to use Data Visualization is to simplify complex data and make it easy to understand, removing unnecessary elements from your charts is a must.

One of the things to remove is 3D effects. Apart from looking silly like some kind of a Word-ready-made chart, any 3D effect can distort the data and mislead the viewer. Unless your visualization is meant to be a 3D chart, always stir away from it. 3D obscures the data, creating room for assumptions instead of analysis.