We were delighted to once again feature independent educator and best-selling author Nick Desbarats, founder of Practical Reporting, on Statistically Speaking. We drew an engaged audience interested in learning more about “How to Choose a Chart Type (It’s Trickier Than You Think).” Nick’s presentation used examples from his Practical Charts course, which generated a lot of questions from our viewers. Keep reading for Nick’s answers to the questions we weren’t able to address during the livestream.
Any guidance for legends, ticks, labels, fonts, and colors to use, especially for the visually impaired?
In the current versions of my courses and books, I only discuss color vision deficiency (colorblindness), since it's so common (found in about 4% of the general population), and selecting font styles to maximize legibility. There are, however, far more considerations that should be taken into account with regard to accessibility; I plan to add these considerations to future courses and book editions.
In the meantime, people with accessibility challenges have told me that they found this article on how to adapt charts to be shown in black and white to be helpful, since making these changes also makes charts more accessible to those with even fairly severe visual impairments.
Do your books go over proper use of more advanced charts, e.g., radar/spider, funnel, etc.?
My first book, “Practical Charts,” covers 30 basic chart types that general audiences tend to be familiar with and that might be found in mainstream media. My second book, “More Practical Charts,” covers 20 advanced chart types – such as scatter plots, histograms, and cycle plots – that can only be used with audiences that have higher-than-average levels of data savviness.
Regarding radar/spider graphs and funnel charts specifically, I actually feel that both of these chart types should be avoided in everyday business communication, since there are alternatives that virtually always show the same type of data in simpler, more informative ways. For example, data that I've seen represented as radar/spider graphs is almost always easier to understand and more informative if shown as a heat map. Here is an example from my Practical Charts course:
Do your cover ANOVA and other statistical charts in your books or courses?
I don't cover charts that represent advanced statistical techniques or concepts (I only go as far as simple correlation and distribution charts). However, many of the guidelines and principles in my books and courses would apply to charts that represent advanced statistical concepts, so I believe that they'd still be helpful when designing those kinds of charts.
It's worth noting that charts that represent advanced statistical techniques or concepts are usually used for data analysis, rather than communicating data-related insights to audiences. When using charts for analysis, the design guidelines are very different than when designing charts for communication to an audience. Typically, no one sees charts for analysis except for the chart designer, who's using those charts to discover useful patterns and relationships within the data. Once those useful patterns and relationships are discovered, they usually need to be communicated to an audience, which is when the guidelines that I cover in my courses and books would kick in.
We’d like to thank Nick for sharing more of his expertise. If you missed this episode of Statistically Speaking, you can watch it on demand, as well as download a copy of his slides. Also, be sure to use the discount code he shared with viewers to take advantage of a discount for his online course.
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