Making a data visual noise-free
Removing noise from a data visual is not only about taking things away such as gridlines, axes or legends. That’s just one part of it, which we could call removing physical noise. Improving the signal-to-noise ratio is often also about adding little things that help our audience better understand the visual. We are helping them by removing mental noise, or mental barriers.
Towards a noise-free data visual
This visual is a concrete example from sports science. It’s a typical chart you could encounter in a scientific article or report. It does, however, contain a lot of noise.
The improved visual on the right presents the same data in a much clearer way. To achieve this, we made a lot of small choices, all meant to remove mental noise and make the chart just a little bit easier to interpret.
A lot of tiny changes…
- First of all, the message is now loud and clear from the title: we see an increased injury rate in athletes with a specific muscle typology. Remember – a clear visual tells a story, it shouldn’t hide the story from our audience. ‘Original cohort’ is not a very insightful title.
- We flipped the chart around to talk about ‘injury rate’ rather than ‘cumulative survival’. The latter is a scientific term which might confuse audiences not familiar with it. Athletes are not dying, they are simply getting injured.
- Having a vertical axis makes the chart hard to read. To know the values, especially on the right-hand side of the chart, we need to take out a ruler to estimate them. The improved visual uses gridlines, making it much easier to see when lines cross a certain percentage.
- We also removed the legend and confusing abbreviations, and replaced them with direct labelling, clear colours, and explicitly showing the data values.
- Finally, in a more technical change we switched from stepwise interpolation to linear interpolation of the data points, giving us a more realistic approximation of the growing number of injuries.
…with a lot of impact
That’s a lot of tiny changes to improve the readability of the data visual. Individually, they are not very spectacular or groundbreaking. But together, they can turn a complex chart into a clean visual that’s much faster to interpret, with a much clearer message.
If you want to know more about visualizing data in the right way, you can check out the other videos in this series. Or I invite you to read my book, Powerful Charts, that will give you actionable insights and practical guidelines to create data visuals that truly engage and inspire your audience.
Full video series
- 01. Why is data visualization so powerful?
- 02. Why is data visualization so challenging?
- 03. Navigating the landscape of powerful charts
- 04. A powerful chart tells a story
- 05. A powerful chart has a high signal-to-noise ratio
- 06. Making a data visual noise-free
- 07. 7 different goals for your chart
- 08. Three roles of colour in a data visual
- 09. Choosing the right font for your data visual
- 10. Can you use Excel to create a powerful chart? (coming on January 09, 2023)
Read more:
Choosing the right font for your data visual
Fonts evoke emotions: there are very sophisticated fonts, playful fonts, attention-grabbing fonts, and elegant handwritten fonts. Using the wrong type of font can have a lot of impact. In data visualization the implications of typography are mainly focused on readability. Labels and annotations can easily become so small they get hard to read. Above all else, we should choose a font which is readable at small sizes.
Three roles of colour in a data visual
Colour is one of the most crucial tools we have to turn a normal chart into a powerful chart with a clear message, a chart which tells a story rather than simply presenting the information.
7 different goals for your chart
A crucial step in building a powerful chart is choosing the right type of chart. A lot of charts don’t work because they simply use the wrong type of chart. To avoid this trap, we must ask ourselves a basic question: what’s the ultimate goal of our data visual? What do we want to show with our data?
Three tips to create powerful charts in Excel
Creating charts in Excel can be a very powerful tool for making sense of complex data sets, and for visualizing them. But the default options are not always the most pretty or effective ones. Here are our top three tips to create better Excel charts.
A powerful chart has a high signal-to-noise ratio
‘Less is more’. It’s a crucial principle in most of our communication, and in data visualization in particular. Because of my background as a physicist, I prefer to talk about the ‘signal-to-noise ratio’. The message - our signal - should be amplified as much as possible, giving it all of the attention. Everything that can distract from our message - the noise - should be removed.
A powerful chart tells a story
A powerful chart has a clear message. It should be short and meaningful, and obvious in the blink of an eye. If there’s only one thing our audience remembers at the end of the day, this should be it.
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