Visualization is not the point. Communication is.

The most important yet ironic lesson I think the DVS class emphasizes is that visualization is not the point; rather it’s communication. It blows my mind that technical undergraduate courses don’t have a similar program because the way we’re used to visualizing data is strictly within the context of the academe. In practice, most people end up working for the government of private corporations with no clue on how to communicate or visualize information to the average person.

Data visualization is always about communicating information. Most of us fall into the trap of visualizing for the sake of visualizing to the point that the entire point of the analysis is lost. For example, plain, bold text telling you an important statistic is way more effective than a fancy pie graph with more than seven partitions simply because it communicates the information better. Likewise, a visualization of a small slice of the data is better than visualizing everything if you’re only really concerned with the small portion.

On top of communicating is being concise. Less is more. I would advise anyone making a presentation to stick to the topic at hand and focus only on the point of the presentation. Asking yourself “so what?” for every visualization is extremely useful in trimming a presentation if it feels bloated or unfocused. Do away with the chart if even you can’t tell why it’s there. In practice, executives and other busy bodies don’t have more than five minutes to listen and look at someone’s presentation, so it’s important to be keep it simple, direct, and informative.

The last but equally important thing would be context. Presentations are always more effective when you know your audience. For example, you can be very technical in a presentation with your professors because the point of it would probably be an in-depth look into a concept. It’s safe to use a box plot or a correlogram since all of you know how to interpret those. On the contrary, you’ll need to simplify your language and be a bit more creative if you’re presenting to non-technical people. It never hurts to avoid jargon and use examples or analogies instead as long as it gets the point across. You’ll need to stick to more common charts that everyone’s familiar with in this case.

To summarize, the point of data visualization isn’t visualization. It’s about communicating information to your audience in the simplest, most effective way, and everyone needs to learn it how to do it well.