Charts and dashboards tend to be done as an afterthought to analytics. The interesting work (to the analyst) has already been finished at this point. There is a rush to put together some visuals so one can move on to the next challenge.
The rush to throw together a visual is a mistake in itself, as the first impression your audience, the people at the meeting or the users of your dashboard, will make on the quality of your analytics is determined by what they see first - your visuals. In this chapter, we will use the word audience to refer to both the end users of a dashboard and the viewers of an analytics presentation.
This makes it far more important to get it right than you may think. Analytics for the sake of analytics is pointless. Someone needs to actually use it, for it to have value. For someone to be willing to use it, they must understand it and be engaged by it.
It is easy to design bad visuals; we see examples of it all the time - especially...
