Is my information conceptualor data driven?
Am I declaring something or exploring something?
According to Scott Berinato, the author of Good Charts, asking these two questions willgive yourself the base you need to plan and define a successful data visualization in any given scenario. Deciding whether you are working with ideas or hard data, and whether you are documenting or prototyping will allow you to see where you fall on the 2×2 illustrated above (Berinato, 2016).
Each quadrant of the 2×2 offers a different approach to data visualization based on preliminary information specific to a certain dataviz task. Let’s go through the ideas behind each quadrant and become more familiar with the strategizing that is behind effective dataviz.
The Upper Left Quadrant: Idea Illustration
If you want to create a visualization that declares ideas which don’t require hard data, you fall in the Idea Illustration quadrant. A lot of the times, these simple and straight-forward charts are used to display organizational ideas and cycle diagrams (Berinato, 2016).
As an example of Idea Illustration, let’s look at a page from the Target Corporate Responsibility Report. Below you can see that Target has created a chart to illustrate their approach to corporate responsibility, which embraces a number of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this cycle diagram you can clearly distinguish the company’s four methods of corporate responsibility, along with which SDGs are practiced under each. This is a great example of an easy-to-read diagram that firmly states a company’s strategic blueprint of conceptual goals, which do not require any form of data.
The Lower Left Quadrant: Idea Generation
When you combine conceptual and exploratory ideas you get Idea Generation. It may seem odd to chart two things that seem so abstract, but in reality, Idea Generation is more common than you may initially believe. Idea Generation is just as it sounds, it is the documentation of your ideas during a brainstorming or ideation session. Many times, they are in the form of sketches and are done on scrap pieces of paper and on white boards (Berinato, 2016).
Think about the working information architecture of a website as an example of Idea Generation. These frameworks of information are not based off of any data and are likely to be switched around throughout the designing process. These charts can be quickly sketched and reiterated during brainstorming sessions in order to easily explore different IA concepts. Below you can see an example of dataviz that utilizes Idea Generation methods. The image displays the workings of a new information architecture for a company’s intranet. The Post-it notes allow for movement and exploration of different organizational concepts in a visual manor.
The Lower Right Quadrant: Visual Discovery
In this quadrant we discover, “Is what I suspect actually true?” By plotting multiple data sets together on a chart, you can find out if hypotheses are confirmed or if other ways of approaching an idea should be explored. These types of charts are great for market research and aid in producing good user experience design by getting researchers more acquainted with their audiences (Berinato, 2016).
In the line chart below you can see the trends of the fast food intake of Australian teenagers over the stretch of 25 years. By quickly glancing at the chart you can see that more teens are getting their fast food fix from hamburgers and pizza rather than the historically popular fish and chips. This visual discovery can lead a market researcher of a fast food chain to make certain decisions about who they may market their restaurants to.
The Upper Right Quadrant: Everyday Dataviz
When you reach the upper right-hand quadrant, you are ready to declare your data-driven outcomes. This type of data visualization is what you see during presentations when finalized research is shown to an audience to absorb. This means it has been presented not only with firm information, but also with refined visuals (Berinato, 2016).
Below is an excerpt from the 2018 L’Oreal Annual Report. Here, they have presented their research which declares that, while the overall beauty market continues to grow, the growth of the skincare market alone is one that has surpassed. This gives the users of L’Oreal an insight to the motivation behind trends they may have seen from the company.
Samantha Mantiglia 