00.Best Practices
A look at the landscape and terminology
...
A cluttered report page will be hard to understand at-a-glance and may be so overwhelming that readers won’t even try. Get rid of all report elements that aren’t necessary. Don’t add bells-and-whistles that don’t help comprehension or navigation. Your report page needs to convey the information as clearly and quickly and cohesively as it can.Edward Tufte calls it “data to ink ratio” in his book
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Basically, remove anything that isn’t essential.The clutter you remove will increase the whitespace on your report page and give you more real estate for applying the best practices we learned about above in the “Alignment, order, and proximity” section.
...
Remember that the function of your report is to meet a business need; not to be pretty. But some level of beauty is required, especially when it comes to first impressions. Nashville consultant Tony Bodoh explains "Emotion fires a half-second before logic can kick in." Readers will first react at an emotional level to your report page, before they take more time to dig deeper. If your page looks disorganized, confusing, unprofessional…your reader may never discover the powerful story it tells.TDI blogger and TechTarget industry analyst Wayne Eckerson has a great analogy. Designing a report is like decorating a room. Over time you purchase a vase, a sofa, end table, a painting. Separately you like all of these elements. But although each individual selection makes sense, collectively the objects clash or compete for attention.
Concentrate on: - Creating a common theme or look for your report, and apply it to all pages of the report - Using standalone images and other graphics to support and not detract from the real story - And applying all the best practices we discussed up to this point in the article.
...
The main limitation of a tree map is the limited ability to compare the different rectangles beyond the top ones. It is a good chart for an overview but column and bar chart are probably a better choice to have more precise idea of the relative size of different components.
For example, the first tree map gives a broad indication of the order of the GDP size, but it’s hard to identify specific differences between countries, particularly the smaller unlabeled boxes. For this data, where a single grouping is compared, a bar or column chart might be a better choice.
...