From the course: Learning Data Visualization

Three focal points

From the course: Learning Data Visualization

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Three focal points

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- [Instructor] When you're visualizing data, you're very often focusing, aggregating, or in some other way, summarizing the data for your audience. You're very likely not including every single bit of detail in your data set in your visualization. Even when you are; say, your data set is just two numbers, the percentage of people who do or do not like the flavor of ice cream you're selling; even then you might focus on some aspect of the data to communicate even those two numbers in a way that's helpful to your audience. You're still bubbling up the insight by how you visualize it, which requires a thoughtful focus. But how do you focus and what should you focus on? I've created a family of acronyms to help you with this. I have to warn you, they're absolutely terrible but they have a pretty good shorthand. The KWYs, which rhymes with why which is what you constantly need to be asking along with other questions. Okay, here's the first terrible acronym. It's pronounced KWYDIS. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You need to know what your data is saying, obviously. I don't need to dwell on this one. Of course, you need to understand your data to communicate it, but you don't have to be a data scientist. You need to understand enough so your communication captures the right level of detail and nuance for your audience. You need enough data literacy to ask the right questions of the person analyzing the data if it's not you. The second terrible acronym is KWYANTH. Yeah, it's bad. You need to know what your audience needs to hear. Most people don't really think enough about this one, and the key word there is "need." Your boss may ask you for the quarterly sales figures but what she really needs is the profits. So you need to get that out of her by asking good questions or you have to anticipate that need. And here's the last one: KWYRWTS. Yeah, it's terrible, right? Bad acronym or not, KWYRWTS stands for know what you really want to say, and it's one of the most important ideas in this entire course. It seems obvious. You need to know what you want to say to communicate. This is absolutely critical. Most of the time, we think we know what we want to say but we don't take a step back and think deeply about it. For instance, asking ourselves questions like, is this really what I want to say? Why? What's the real point here? What do I want my audience to do with this information and why is this the right thing to be focusing on, et cetera? You get the drift. Question everything and you'll do a better job really communicating what you want to communicate. This is where 99% of communication failures occur. We don't stop and ask these questions of ourselves, our colleagues, and our clients. So remember the KWYs. Question everything, think very critically about your data, your audience, and your own message.

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