Asking the Right Questions
Explore how to ask the right questions to transform data into meaningful information through visualization. Understand your audience's needs, the message to convey, and how to choose simple, effective charts that highlight key insights without overwhelming viewers. Learn to select visualization types based on your communication goals, including comparison, survey outcomes, or component relationships, to create clear and engaging data stories.
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Visualizations are powerful tools for communicating complex information in a clear and engaging way. However, creating an effective visualization requires more than just picking a chart and plugging in some data. To truly communicate a message with visualization, we must ask the right questions and carefully select the pieces we need to tell our story.
Preliminary questions
To transform data into information, consider answering the following preliminary questions:
What are the audience’s requirements?
What information do they seek?
Which message do we want to convey?
Are we trying to explain a complex concept, highlight a trend, or persuade the audience to take a particular action?
Once we understand the message, we think about conveying it visually. Consider answering the following questions:
Is a graph necessary for presenting data, or would words, ...