[June 22 2020 update: I've just posted a recording of the first 70 minutes of the Practical Charts course online as a freely available video. Enjoy!]
When my friend and colleague Stephen Few announced his retirement from teaching, I continued to teach his courses, but also began work on two new courses of my own design: Practical Dashboards, which I launched last year, and Practical Charts. Following a successful trial run last month, I’m delighted to announce that Practical Charts is now available for delivery as a private workshop online (four half-days) and, when it’s safe to travel, in person (two full days), for groups of 15 to 30 participants. Individual members of any organization can also take the course by registering for one of my upcoming open-registration online workshops
Practical Charts arose from my experiences teaching Steve’s foundational Show Me the Numbers course to thousands of professionals in over a dozen countries during the past six years, through which I discovered:
A number of fundamental misconceptions that almost everyone has about data visualization, and that make it difficult to create truly effective charts until they’re dispelled.
The most common data visualization mistakes that people make, as well as the best practices that people tend to know already.
The most common types of data visualization challenges that arise in today’s real-world organizations.
The data viz “tricks” that most people aren’t aware of, but that they tend to use frequently after discovering them.
Practical Charts fills the gaps that most people have in their data visualization knowledge and skips what people tend to know already. While it is based on landmark findings in data visualization and visual perception, there’s relatively little theory and the focus is on hands-on learning and practice. The course is highly interactive, with frequent ad hoc discussions and eight breakout activities, including several “design challenges”.
The ultimate goal of Practical Charts is more ambitious, though: To equip participants with enough knowledge to competently handle all of the data visualization challenges that they’re likely to encounter day-to-day. Obviously, there are a lot of different types of data viz challenges that regularly arise in organizations, so we cover a lot of ground (550+ slides!) and move pretty fast during those four half-days.
The course is structured into clearly defined sections so that participants are always oriented as we move through the many topics that need to be covered in order to equip them with the skills to design clear, effective, and useful charts for a wide variety of situations and audiences:
Nine data visualization myths
The seven reasons why so many charts fail
Formatting charts
Color, legends, scales (five types), borders/axes/tick marks
The “big seven” chart types
Line charts, bar charts, pie charts (more on that in a future post), histograms, scatter plots, maps, tables
Important variants and alternatives of the big seven (50+ chart types!) and when to use each
Making charts obvious
Making charts graphically obvious (obvious before even starting to read titles or callouts), and minimizing cognitive effort
Accounting for different levels of audience graphicacy (ability to read graphs)
Effective chart titles, callouts, and annotations
Specific (but common) challenges and solutions
Visualizing outliers, visualizing seasonal data, special considerations for charts that will be generated automatically, etc.
What about…? (commonly asked-about topics)
Interactivity/filters, dual axis charts, combo charts, third (z) axis, VR/AR, AI, etc.
Chart types to avoid (radar graphs, packed bubble charts, funnel charts, etc.)
What now?
Recommended resources for further learning, selling audiences on simple, well-designed charts that actually make their lives easier, tips for spreading good practices in your organization, “open mic” (any unanswered questions?)
At the end of each of the “Formatting charts” and “Big seven chart types” sections, key takeaways are reviewed and summarized in a “cheat sheet”, examples of which are below. (Note that these are not intended to be self-explanatory outside of the course; I’m only including them here to provide an idea of what cheat sheets look like.)
(Click images to enlarge.)
There are over 25 such sheets in the Practical Charts Cheat Sheets PDF that participants receive along with a PDF of the slides used during the course.
The response from participants in early Practical Charts workshops has been beyond my most optimistic expectations. A sampling of comments from participants:
“I’ve held senior business intelligence roles for two decades and am familiar with many data visualization training programs. Nick’s course is currently the best data visualization training in the world. Despite having discussed and studied data visualization with many people over the years, it STILL left me with the feeling of having a reprogrammed brain. I want to go back and redesign every chart that I've ever created. I feel so grateful to have been among the first people to experience it.” - Chris Weis, Product Manager - Data Visualization, Kaufman Hall
"This workshop was jam-packed with practical content that will have a major impact on my day-to-day work. The Cheat Sheet handouts alone are unbelievably helpful." - Katerina Naddaf, Team Lead, Government of Canada
“It’s been an incredible few days and the time just flew by. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a training course! The Practical Charts course definitely lives up to its name and Nick is a fantastic instructor, able to teach extremely valuable, practical techniques and considerations to guide participants on how to communicate data to others in the most effective and useful way.” - Amie Das, Senior Manager, KPMG
“This course was amazing and I was buzzing after each day. Nick’s approach, sequence and examples are spot on. I’m now rethinking everything I know about data visualization.” - Rachel Trafford, Director of Organizational Metrics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I’m excited to finally be able to deliver this course to clients globally, with several online private workshops already scheduled for this summer and fall. If you’d like to discuss a private workshop for your organization, please contact my colleague, Bryan Pierce, at info@practicalreporting.com.