You're a Marketing Research professional. How can you make your data visualization more powerful?

2 Use colors, labels, and legends wisely

Colors, labels, and legends are essential elements of data visualization, helping to highlight key points, add context, and guide viewers. To maximize their effectiveness, you must use them wisely and avoid cluttering charts with too much information or distracting colors. To ensure your presentation or report is consistent, use a single color scheme. Contrasting colors are useful for emphasizing differences or categories. Labels and legends should explain what the data represents and what the axes measure. Additionally, use clear and concise language free of jargon or acronyms. To unify your charts, maintain the same font size and style for all of them.

3 Tell a story with your data

Data visualization is more than just presenting facts and figures; it's about telling a story with your data that engages and persuades your audience to take action. To achieve this, you need to have a clear goal and message, understand your audience and their interests, organize your data logically, and use titles, subtitles, captions, annotations, transitions, animations, and interactivity to create flow and interaction.

4 Follow the data-ink ratio principle

The data-ink ratio principle, introduced by Edward Tufte, is a concept that suggests the ratio of ink used to display data to the total ink used in a chart should be as high as possible. This means you should eliminate any elements that do not add value to your data visualization, such as grid lines, borders, and backgrounds; 3D effects, shadows, and gradients; decorative icons, images, and shapes; and excessive tick marks, labels, and legends. Following this principle will help you create simple, elegant, and effective data visualizations that focus on the data and the message.