Identifying effective and ineffective visualizations

The main goal of data visualization is to have the reader quickly digest the data, including possible trends, relationships, and more. Ideally, a reader will not have to spend more than 5-6 seconds digesting a single visualization. For this reason, we must make visuals very seriously and ensure that we are making a visual as effective as possible. Let's look at four basic types of graphs: scatter plots, line graphs, bar charts, histograms, and box plots.

Scatter plots

A scatter plot is probably one of the simplest graphs to create. It is made by creating two quantitative axes and using data points to represent observations. The main goal of a scatter plot is to highlight relationships between two variables and, if possible, reveal a correlation.

For example, we can look at two variables: average hours of TV watched in a day and a 0-100 scale of work performance (0 being very poor performance and 100 being excellent performance). The goal...