Designing Dashboards and Reports
Everyone has probably heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you can’t interpret that picture? What if you don’t know what you’re looking at? We were all exposed to charts, infographics, and other visual aids, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we’ve all seen how crucial data has become. We all witnessed visualizations that were made, some of which were even worse than before. Nobody benefits from poor visualizations or visuals that are difficult to interpret.
Charts can deceive us, and charts can lie in a variety of ways, such as giving us wrong or insufficient numbers, weird patterns, and so on. We recently witnessed a politician exhibit a single line graph on a piece of paper and remark, “Well, it goes up, so don’t bother; the line is moving up.” Without a single word of explanation, no specific facts to examine, it was simply stated, “The line is going...
