Welcome back to our journey of five questions to ask yourself when designing a graph for explanatory purposes. So far, we’ve addressed three of the five: decluttering, intentional use of color and, in yesterday’s post how different graphs enable us to see different things:

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To decide which of these views might work best, I should step back and consider: why am I showing this data in the first place?

QUESTION 4: What action does my audience need to take?

When communicating with data, always consider what broader purpose it serves. Too often, we don’t pause and think about the context (understandable in the real-world maelstrom of deadlines, constraints and organizational politics!). Rather, we force the visuals that we used to analyze the data upon our audience, hoping they’ll come to the same conclusion.

One strategy for considering the underlying context is to form a Big Idea. This thought exercise forces you to think about what’s at stake for your audience and what they need to do, leaving you with a concise and compelling action statement. This single sentence then becomes your guidepost for evaluating individual graphs: does it help reinforce the overarching goal?

Although we don’t have the full context behind this example, let’s assume that the audience is a new senior product manager developing next year’s promotional strategy and needs to understand recent changes in the marketplace. I’ll use the Big Idea worksheet to form my single-sentence main message:

To offset a 24% sales decline due to COVID-19 and increase market share next year, consider how customers are opting for different purchase types as we form our new promotional strategy.

The action my audience needs to take is to use their newfound understanding of shifting purchase types to develop future promotional strategies. Having identified the next step, I can now choose which graph(s) will best drive this discussion. I’ll opt for the line graph to show the historical total sales decline, paired with the slopegraph to emphasize the shift in purchase types:

Am I done yet? While the graphs are more aesthetically pleasing than the messy original, they still don’t answer the question “so what?” to someone seeing them for the first time. To mitigate this, we’ll pull it all together with our fifth and final question in the next post.

For more data storytelling inspiration, take a spin around our newly launched makeover page. If these are skills you need to develop, register for one of our upcoming public courses and get ready to set yourself apart from the mess of 3D exploding pie charts.