Decisionmaking checklist
When you’re planning out your own work, it’s important to make conscious decisions about what you’re doing and why. I keep saying this, but one of the things I dislike the most about no-code visualization products like Excel or Tableau is that they encourage you to not make these decisions, but to just rely on defaults or automated suggestions.
In contrast to just going with defaults, you as a thoughtful visualization practitioner should go through the decisions you could make in order to determine what decisions you should make. This is something you do in your EDA process, as well as in sketching charts on paper.
It’s also useful for understanding a chart someone else made, whether just to read it, or to revise or critique it.
Checklist
What decisions could be / should be / were made about…
- what data to include
- what data to exclude
- what visual encodings to use
- what types of scales to use (sequential, qualitative, diverging)
- what to put on the x- and y-axes
- how to scale the x- and y-axes
- how to use color
- how to use text
- how to use annotations
- where to draw attention
- what conclusion to suggest
What have I forgotten from this list?