How to use the chart chooser

TLDR: Most quick reference guides advise you which visualization to use based on what
you want people to see in the data. That’s tougher at the analysis stage, when you don’t
yet know what’s there to see. I created a new chooser that’s based instead on the
structure of the plotted data.

How would you plot these data?

Imagine that I give you the 8 numbers above, and ask you to graph them in a display
where you can flexibly uncover patterns. I use this example frequently in data
visualization workshops, and the typical result is a deer-in-the-headlights look. And these
are smart audiences — college undergraduates, Ph.D. students, MBAs, or business
analysts. Most are overwhelmed with options: Bars, Lines, Pies, Oh My. If I instead show
the data already in a visualization and ask them to replot it, the audience pivots from
being overwhelmed with options, to being unable to imagine the data plotted in any
other way.

Visualization quick reference guides (also known as ‘chart choosers’) are a great
solution to these problems, abstracting over wonky theories to provide direct
suggestions for how to represent data. These guides are typically organized by viewer
tasks — does the designer want the viewer to see a ranking, examine a distribution,
inspect a relationship, or make a comparison? These guides then use these tasks to
categorize (or flowchart) viable alternative designs. Students and practitioners (heck, and
researchers) appreciate the way that these tools help them break out of being
overwhelmed with options, or fixated on a single possibility.
There are several great task-based chart choosers out there (here’s an example from the
Financial Times), so why make a new one? Choosing a visualization based on task can be
a helpful constraint when it’s time to communicate a known pattern to an audience. But it
can be less useful at the analysis stage before that, where you have only vague notions
of potentially important tasks. Early commitment to a visualization suited to a specific task
might even cause you to fixate on one pattern, and miss another. And some tasks are
vaguely defined. I find ‘See Relationship’ and ‘Make Comparison’ particularly fuzzy. Didn’t
Tufte proclaim that everything is a comparison? For analysts, the best visualization format
is typically the one that is flexibly useful across tasks, allowing general foraging through
possible patterns.

But if not task, what’s another way to organize a chooser? When I decided to set up a
new one, I liked the simple objectivity of picking the visualization according to the
structure of the data being plotted (though I was recently delighted to be pointed to
another chooser with a similar setup).

The small dataset below illustrates the typical types of quantitative data in any excel
sheet: categories, ordered categories, and continuous metrics. Once you decide which
columns of the dataset to throw together, the chooser (in theory) tells you the best
options. I’ll walk through how it works below.

You have a pile of metrics (numbers), perhaps you’d like to bin them by discrete
categories (typically, a bar graph), or maybe two categories at the same time, as in a 2-
dimensional table (I like Bar Tables for this). Or perhaps you want those metrics
organized along a continuous axis (another metric) as when plotting values that change
over time (typically, a line graph), and then maybe you’d like to show that binned by
discrete categories (typically, a line graph with multiple lines on it). If, instead of absolute
values, the metrics should be interpreted as percentages, that typically entails spatially
smooshing the graph into pies or stacked bars.

Sample data
The horizontal axis of the quick reference guide, Discrete Categories to Continuous
Metrics

I teach and analyze my data with Tableau, which automatically changes visualization
designs based on whether a visualization organizes data by fields designated as discrete
or continuous (which in turn is based on a history of work in data visualization). That
discrete-vs.-continuous difference became the core organizing principle for the
horizontal axis of the chooser. Metrics organized by discrete category bins are on the left,
and metrics organized by other continuous metrics are on the right. Metrics organized by
their awkward child of ordered categories sit in the middle seat.

There are two key design changes that happen from left to right. First, organizing metrics
by discrete categories (left side of chart chooser) leads to bar graphs with multiple
discrete bars, and organizing metrics by other continuous metrics (right) leads to line
graphs with continuous lines. This design change strongly influences whether viewers
properly interpret the structure of the data, as seen in psychological experiments (see the
population height graphs, and typical related interpretations, below, taken from the
bottom-center of the chooser).

Height values for citizens of two countries. Seriously, people literally say this.

Second, for the discrete categories on the left, bars are organized vertically as a ‘row
graph’ so that the ‘A,B,C’ labels, which are actually typically whole words or phrases, can
have space to be written out as horizontal text. In a vertically organized ‘column graph’,
those words would have to be severely cramped, or turned diagonally or vertically, which
is all tough to read. For the continuous metric organizations at right (and the orange
ordered category values in the middle), values are organized from left to right, because
that’s what people expect. Time moves from left to right in the human mind, and so do
increasing continuous quantities, like the number line posted above the chalkboard in
your elementary school classroom.

The vertical organizing principle is more lumpy. The top row shows metrics organized by
the entries of a single category (a single set of bars or points, or a single set of points
connected by a line or area). Then the rows underneath show similar designs for
organizing metrics by the entries two categories at the same time, as in a 2-dimensional
table. The next section below that repeats the same organization, but for metrics that
should be interpreted as percentages or parts of a whole, instead of independent
absolute values.

In the bottom section with the blue background, the left side simply shows engaging
ways of showing single numbers or percentages, and the right side depicts ways to pit
two continuous metrics against each other (mostly varieties of perpendicularly-
coordinated scatterplots, though there is also an appearance from its overly-ambitious
cousin, parallel coordinates). Note that the metrics in the scatterplots are still divided by
the entries of a category (the number of entries of that category determine the number of
dots on the scatterplot, or the number of lines for parallel coordinates).

Popping back to the table of 8 numbers from the start, the structure of the data is metrics
(the percentages) binned by 2 categories (ABC is Region: N,S,E,W, while XYZ is Product
Type: Widgets, Blickets). So if the metrics should be thought of as absolute values, a Bar
Table is best, and if percentages are the preferred focus, then Stacked Bars (Row) is an
alternative to consider.
These take time to learn, making them terrible for rapid communication to lay audiences.
But for analysts, or when you have 3 minutes to teach your audience how to read them,
they can be useful visualizations for complex data.

I tried to include only well-known visualizations, the types that are present in existing
typical chart choosers. I did include a few newfangled options, because I think they’re
worth learning. Marimekko charts, connected scatterplots, and parallel coordinates take a
little time to understand, but can be powerful.

Business analysts, please stop using this

I included treemaps, which I see surprisingly often in the business world, primarily to
discourage their use. Treemaps are meant to show a large hierarchical dataset with two
metrics coded separately as size and color, but I frequently see them used to show non-
hierarchical data, typically with size and color (confusingly) redundantly encoding the
same values, typically with a diverging color ramp (so that small boxes are red, mediums
are grey, and big ones are blue). Many thousands of businesspersonhours have been
lost to the confused viewers of that chart, which should just have been a bar graph.
Same DNA.

You know how you think you know something right up until you have to write it down,
explain it to someone, or to actually build something, and then you realize that you know
less than you know, or much of what you know doesn’t make sense? Creating this chart
chooser helped me see visualizations in new ways. For a while, I no longer understood
where a heatmap belonged (it has shifted around to at least three different spots on the
page so far). It’s currently a way of slicing metrics by two ordered categories, but am still
open to moving it. I now see that Rosling scatterplots and maps share the same DNA,
with the maps using latitude and longitude as the axes of the scatterplot (this is the way
that Tableau treats maps).

I realized that I have no evidence for some claims, like that Bar Tables are better than
Interleaved Bars, even though one of our own studies shows otherwise, I think the right
test hasn’t yet been done. That recommendation might be particularly controversial
because the Bar Table puts some bar comparisons along a non-aligned baseline, which
makes the comparison less precise (because you can only compare lengths and lose the
ability to compare the bar ends). But I think that a small drop in visual precision is
overwhelmed by the greater clarity and flexibility of the Bar Table’s 2-dimensional visual
organization. There’s also no empirical evidence for the chooser’s claim that a truncated
y-axis is less bad on a line graph compared to a bar graph, and I may end up deleting
that factoid.
Most visualization designers see no reason to ever do this, but a handful of analysts
swear it’s perceptually superior for perception of correlation

Standard visualization designer remake of above

I’ve also been challenged in welcome ways. There’s a prescription in my chart chooser to
always use a ‘Bar-Line Table’ instead of the ‘Dual Axis’ graph more commonly used in the
business world. But every quarter or so, I have a fun fight with an analyst who swears that
the dual axis allows better perception of correlation between the two sets of values (and
yes, they understand that they are comparing axes that are apples and oranges, etc.,
they get what you are muttering to yourself right now). I am now only mostly-certain that
I’m right, so I have an empirical test for that on our lab’s to-do list (Hey visualization Ph.D.
students: This is a long list, contact me if you’re interested in collaborating on testing
things like this).
Creating and using the chooser has forced me to learn to see through visualizations, to
the structure of their underlying data, and that helps overcome design fixation. At a
recent workshop, we were critiquing a cash flow visualization, where money came in
from a set of sources X, Y, & Z, and each source was differentially allocated to
expenditure A, B & C. The original was Sankey-style flow diagram of where the money
headed from each source. It was lovely but impractical spaghetti. Even I was stuck on
that design, and had to force myself to look at the guide to determine that the Marimekko
actually nicely fit the structure of those data.

North and South are asymmetric, East and West are similar

This guide focuses its choices based on the structure of the data, instead of a viewer’s
task. But both models are important. It points the user to a cluster of visualizations, but
my advice from there is to still consider task, by quickly sketching or plotting your data in
a few formats, and seeing which one shouts your pattern the loudest (or, cross-
referencing with a task-based guide). For example, the Mirror Bar at right yells ‘inverse
relationship’ in a way that the Bar Table above doesn’t, even with the same data. There’s
probably a way to add a 3rd dimension of ‘task’ to the present guide, and I look forward
to someone figuring out how to visualize that cube (hmm… interactive task-based
highlighting of a subset of options?).

I’m most excited about the guide serving as a formalization of guidelines that could be
validated, refined, or rejected by the practitioner and research communities (with
answers perhaps bubbling up to more sophisticated frameworks). The recommendations
here are imperfect, and I’m happy to continually alter it to fit the consensus opinions on
what it gets wrong (I’m looking at you, DataVis Society Slack channel). I’m just as excited
about the unsolved debates, which will be immediately pitched to Ph.D. students as
empirical research projects, to ultimately combine what practitioners, designers, and
researchers know about how to pick the most effective visualization.

-Steve Franconeri
Thoughts? Drop me a note at [email protected]