Choosing The Right Chart – Part 2

If you haven’t read Part 1 – Read it here.

Do you need to exhibit the composition of something?

A pie chart is best used when trying to work out the composition of something. If you want your audience to have a general sense of the part-to-whole relationship in your data and comparing the precise sizes of the slices is less important.

Design Best Practices for Pie Chart:

• Avoid 3D and exploding effects
• Don’t have a ton of slices
• Sort your data meaningfully
• Eliminate the legend and label the data directly

Are you trying to show changes in location data over time?

They’re usually shaded in proportion to the value of some variable, and can be used to show location-based patterns.

Design Best Practices for Maps:

• Avoid using multiple colors
• Start from light shade to darker one with respective to data
• Do not display data in a map. Use tooltips.

Rules of Thumb:

• Use only 10 rows, in Tables
• Use less than 6 line, in Line Graph
• Use less than 7 Bars, in Bar Graph
• Use less than 7 segments, in Pie chart
• Use same color with shade variant throughout the map

Finally, when visualizing data in an infographic, Keep it Simple!