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Creating an effective graph

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:16 am
by kexej28769@nongnue
It's perfectly fine for reports to be large, as long as their order is consistent with the odds that the decision will change someone's mind. Complexity is fine as long as it's accompanied by depth and you don't get it all at once.
At a similar point, you will often have to split the matrix into multiple graphs. Make sure you order them by importance so that someone can stop digging whenever they are happy.


Here's an example from an internal report I created. It shows the page error first and then the page keyword error afterwards so you can dig deeper.

There's nothing wrong with repeating graphs. If austria number data have a summary page with five pages below, each of which picks a key metric from the summary and digs deeper, it's perfectly useful to repeat the summary graph for that metric at the top.
Choose a reporting program that allows for page information, such as Google Data Studio, for example. This will allow you to break down a report into chunks.
Like dashboards, your design should focus on content. Keep it simple — keep styles and colors unified where possible.

Graphs themselves are important elements of a report and dashboard. People have made entire careers out of helping people visualize data on graphs. Rather than reinventing the wheel, the following resources have helped me avoid the worst when it comes to graphs.

Both #1 and #2 below focus not on making things pretty, but on the purpose of the graph: to let you take action on the data as quickly as possible.