Catie Williams, InEight Construction Software, USA, looks at the best practices for visualising data to help communicate information in a clear and effective way.
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everal years ago, employees at InEight Construction Software were asked to implement a new cutting-edge set of visualisation tools for a big ERP implementation. At that time, most work that had been undertaken just involved reproducing existing Excel-based types of reports. After all, it was what people were most comfortable with and what they knew. It was traditional and seen as the way things had always been done. Whilst trying to gain buy-in and adoption from InEight Construction Software’s stakeholders, the system was met with resistance and a lack of trust for the visual style reports that the company made available. Over time, as comfort and maturity with the new system increased, tools such as Tableau® and Microsoft Power BI® were on the rise, and a shift started to form in the acceptance of using data visualisations for managing work. Today, with the right data visualisation tools that provide customisable, interactive, even sharable dashboards, comprehensive visualisations can be built to truly help clients and projects in ways that connect people and systems with new transparency and understanding. The speed at which decisions can be made when presenting information in a visual format is staggering in comparison to what it takes going line by line through pages of numbers. But creating effective data visualisations, that require little explanation and immediately draw attention and provide insights, can be
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challenging. What follows are several best practices in creating data visualisations.
Colour and layout count When it comes to the topic of colour in data representations, especially within today’s best dashboards, it can be tempting to use lots of it because it looks appealing and can seem impressive. However, if everything has colour then nothing will really stand out. Thus it is wise to use colour sparingly for the best impact. The question that should be asked is what story is the data report or chart trying to tell, and will it communicate the right information that the viewer needs to see? It should not be used just for the sake of using it, but only when there is meaning behind it. For instance, when showing positive and negative values, what is the information that should pop out of that? If the information that the user should be aware of first is a negative number (so they can go and fix the issues represented by that number) then that is what should be seen first. In that case, having a bar chart or a tree map that has fairly muted colours, and something that catches the eye for the negative numbers, may be a good idea. The number of colours used should be limited, though, so the viewer is not overwhelmed. On the contrary, say only greys are used in a chart. There will likely be an almost knee-jerk reaction from the viewer that this chart does not have the information
