In business today graphs, charts and gauges often form an important part of measuring and presenting numbers. In our business, which revolves entirely around the presentation of business intelligence and performance management numbers, we see poorly designed graphs and charts on a daily basis.
In order to illustrate (and hopefully prevent) some common design mistakes, we will provide some examples of poorly designed charts, followed by an analysis of the problems and our proposed alternative solution.
The chart below forms part of a presentation we attended, described as “a fantastic presentation of graphics for more visual appeal.”
Our analysis of the problems with this chart:
- The background image is distracting and adds no value
- The gridlines are hardly visible, but do not make it any easier to understand the chart
- The legend uses a lot of space and could be more intuitive to match back to the chart bars
- The bars are unnecessarily thin which makes them harder to see
- The chart has no title
- The Y axis title/units (US$) has been written vertically making it subtly difficult to read.
Our Proposed Solution:
- As a general rule, anything that does not contribute to the meaning of a graph is an unnecessary distraction. Therefore remove the background image and grid lines which are adding no value.
- We considered removing the X and Y axis lines, but decided in the end only to de-emphasize them by changing them from black to light grey.
- We recommend the use of soft, or neutral colours and colours of different saturation. Save bright colours for emphasis only where required. In our solution we could have used colour but used shades of black and grey to highlight that we thought about how our chart would look if it was photocopied or printed in black and white. Imagine how the original solution would look if it had to be faxed.
- The legend has been moved above the chart and ordered in the same sequence as the bars, to ease the process of matching the legend up with the bars.
Moving the legend provides more space for the chart and allows the bars to be thicker for better visual effect.
- Change the orientation of the Y axis title/units to be horizontal.
- Add a title to the chart
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