People are lazy. Make it as easy as possible for them to see what you are trying to show. “Mental noise” is my name for ‘work’ your audience has to do before they can actually see what they want to see. In a graph, it can be taking out a ruler to measure a distance, but also tilting the page to read non-horizontal text, or having to look up jargon.

There are tons of ways to reduce mental noise in your charts, but one of the easiest is avoiding abbreviations. Of course, space constraints, general usage, and the specific nature of the abbreviation don’t always make this possible (I wouldn’t replace DNA by deoxyribonucleic acid everywhere), but a specific case where I tend to avoid abbrevations at all costs are countries.

Yes, countries do have official abbreviations — standardized by the ISO 3166 guidelines. There are even 2-letter ánd 3-letter abbrevations for each country. For example, Belgium’s alpha-2 code is BE, and its alpha-3 code is BEL. In most official documents, such as reports by the European Union, the alpha-2 codes are most commonly used. Lack of space is often the main reason, in charts where 27 countries need to be shown.

But these alpha-2 abbrevations are not always as straightforward as in the case of Belgium. Most people will recognize FR, NL or IT. If you know your languages, DE or ES will also make sense. And with some effort, we can decypher SK or AT, even though they don’t always make sense. Some of the lesser known ones are probably EE (Estonia – local name Eesti), HR (Croatia – local name Hrvatska) or EL (Greece – local name Elláda or Ελλάδα).

If you’re looking at 27 EU countries in a list of graph, that’s quite a lot of cognitive load to untangle and recall all of them. Your audience needs quite some background knowledge in order to fully understand your chart. Some people might not even bother looking up country codes they don’t recognize, which of course lowers the relevance of our entire graph. For this reason, I will almost always avoid country abbreviations, and write their names in full. That doesn’t even have to take up much more space:

Source: I encountered a version of this visual on VRT NWS, in an article on the number of political mandates per country (in Dutch). Most of their data was collected from a flash Eurobarometer report “Local politicians of the EU and the future of Europe” by the European Committee of the Regions.