Best Practices for Data Visualization

1. Horizontal Bar »> Vertical Bar

1-1. Understand the Z-Line

Users usually read a visualization from left-to-right, up-to-down

eyemovement1

1-2. Sort the Horizontal Bar By x value

  • By using a horizontal bar plot AND sorting by x-value, we can put the most important informations in the eye’s z movement.

eyemovement2

  • Because of horizontal plot’s great sync with the eye’s z-movement, this makes horizontal bar plot one of the most effective visualizations
  • Label only when specific value is important - otherwise it’s noise
  • If doing stack plots, normalize the total sum to 100%

2. NO PIE CHART/3D

  • Human eye cannot effectively distinguish size of high dimesional polgons - pie chart and 3d chart

piechart bar

  • 2D area graph is also mostly bad, only good use is when comparing data that greatly vary in size

3. Simple is Better - Power of Text

  • If there is only a few important numbers that you want to show, simple text could be better any complex graph

text