using emojis to draw your audience’s attention
Regular readers of the storytelling with data blog may be familiar with the “where are your eyes drawn?” test. It requires you to:
take a look at your graph, slide or content;
look away;
and then look back and see which element of the content your eyes first land upon.
The goal of this test is to ensure that the eyes of the people in your audience are initially drawn to the same focal point. We commonly suggest achieving this with the sparing and intentional use of qualities like size, color, and position on a page.
Recently, however, one of our clients shared a visual that accomplished this goal via a less common tool: the emoji.
Take a look at this graph, telling us the responses to the question “Which factors influence your decision to remain in your current role?” in a recent employee survey:
The bars represent the proportion of employees who indicated the respective factor influenced them. You’ll see that the “dollar face” emojis indicate financially related factors.
I’d wager that most of us, if we were to conduct the “where are your eyes drawn?” test, would be drawn to the emojis first. In that respect, they’ve done the job of catching our attention. That’s the upside. The downside, however, is that while they are no doubt attention-grabbing, they also feel a little unprofessional. Is it tonally appropriate, in a business environment, to use cutesy imagery when discussing serious personnel matters?
What is “appropriate” is often dependent on the situation. You need to know your message, understand your audience, and consider your recommendation. It may well be that you are confident that your audience would receive this content well, would remain focused on the results, and wouldn’t mind if the presentation included a fun and amusing icon. However, if you’re wrong about your audience, you’re taking the risk of appearing callous or unserious.
While we can’t deny the emojis are attention-grabbing, we can achieve the same level of audience focus in a less risky way with more common techniques.
For example, we could remove the emojis, but compensate for their absence by adding sparing colour to the bars representing financially-driven decision factors. To compensate for losing the legend, we’ll also add a descriptive takeaway in text to the top of the graph.
Where are your eyes drawn?
Our audience will instantly understand what the bars represent by reading this statement, and connecting the colored text to the colors in the graph.
“But Simon,” you may be thinking, “I know that this is the so-called ‘best practice’ way of doing things, but I liked the emojis!” I understand that personal preference is an undeniable aspect of communication design, so perhaps we can meet in the middle on the emoji topic. Before I indulge their return, however, there is one additional aspect of the original graph I’d like to address.
Recall where we started:
Now, while our eyes took us to the emojis, this isn’t really where we should be looking or at least not where we should be looking if we want to evaluate the responses from this survey in the most efficient way. This prompts a question: Can we incorporate these emojis in a way that retains the same attention-grabbing effect, but also affords me instant evaluation of the data?
Let’s find out together. First, we could narrow the width of the bars.
With the bars narrower, we can add a marker at the ends of the bars creating a lollipop graph.
With the markers sized appropriately, we can now move the emojis from their original position near the category labels to the markers of the bars relating to financial factors.
Conducting the “Where are your eyes drawn?” test one final time still directs us to the emojis, but crucially allows us an instant ability to scan down the ends of the lollipops and evaluate the results.
Is the emoji lollipop chart on the right better than the bar chart on the left? That exercise is left up to the reader. I daresay that most business audiences will prefer the more traditional view. But there may be a time when the message we’re delivering is more lighthearted, or our audience responds better to a bit of whimsy…for those cases, we’ve shown that we can still use emojis to draw attention, but by combining them with thoughtfully applied traditional tactics, we can at least make that attention better support the overall message of the visualization.
When there is only one thing that is very different from all the rest, it's almost impossible not to look at it. Whether you decide to use common techniques like we see in the example on the left or more unusual attention-grabbing elements, leveraging these powerful tools is essential to drawing your audience's attention to the important parts of your data and the communications that contain them.
For more examples of visual transformations, check out the before-and-afters in our makeover gallery.