Top 10 Data Visualization Tricks

I recently attended a session on data visualization by none other than Lea Pica (thanks to the kind folks at Search Discovery Education Community — SDEC). In this post, I will share the top 10 tricks I picked up from Lea’s presentation.

1. Be your audience. Know your audience.

Before working on the story you’ll present, think through who the attendees are and what they are looking for. If there are both finance and marketing folks in the room, they will likely have different agendas. Address the details for them in the appendix or have separate meetings to cater the presentation to each group.

2. Have a throughline that can summarize your presentation in one sentence.

The throughline is an invisible thread that binds your story together. The biggest failure occurs when attendees do not know why they are listening to you. An example she shared was

“Our Q3 A/B testing netted a positive gain of 16% in conversion, and could continue to grow another 10% in Q4 with our new test recommendations.”

3. Avoid using bullets on slides.

Yeah, you read that right. Definietly no paragraphs on slides and no bullets either! Bullets serve the presenter more than the audience. Instead Lea suggests restricting a slide to one idea.