3 Data Visualisation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Data visualization should tell a story not to distract or confuse your audience

Ivona Hirschi
Towards Data Science
4 min readFeb 26, 2021

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Image by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Data visualization is a discipline on its own. It happens that people don’t like looking at data tables. They prefer colorful stories. Numbers are just numbers but their interpretation is what matters. So, visualization helps to understand trends, distributions, and data patterns.

Visualization gives data life. It translates numerical answers into actionable recommendations. These support the most important business decisions. Yet, information can be visualized in many different ways.

It is a creative job. But too much creativity is detracting from its purpose. I had to often fight with my graphic colleagues who wanted to make data ‘beautiful’.

Their creative ideas were too abstract to support the actual interpretation. The rule of thumb is that if you do data visualization, it should be clear from the first glance what you are showing.

Be a visualization pro and don’t make these mistakes.

1. Too creative or too simple

We have some sales data to show in a presentation. The data is about how many women and how many men shop for the product. We have 30% of…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Ivona Hirschi
Ivona Hirschi

Written by Ivona Hirschi

🍀 Communication - Management - Leadership. Social media. Business. Mental health. l ivonahirschi.substack.com

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