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5 tips to increase the usability of your charts instantly
Usability is a term thrown around a lot these days. And not without good reason. People are getting busier and busier. If they cannot find exactly what they are looking for within seconds, it doesn’t exist for them…no matter whether they are searching for a product on the web, a feature in a tool or information on a website. So in this day and age, your charts just doing the job of converting heaps of data into easily identifiable shapes and patterns doesn’t cut it anymore. They have to present all information clearly and concisely, prioritize information for at-a-glance understanding and remove the possibility of having any ambiguity.
In this post, I would like to discuss some quick tips to increase the usability of your chart instantly including descriptive captions, informative tooltips and better label management.
The caption should also mention whether the numbers are in millions and the currency in $. In fact, the captions should be so descriptive that the axis labels if used are only left as reinforcements. However, with so many details put in the caption, they might turn out to be a bit too long in some cases. In cases like these, it is a good idea to delegate the units and number scale used to the sub-caption.
This is particularly helpful when you have a lot of data sets to display on the chart. With arranged data, it is very easy to find out who your best sales person is, which marketing medium is the best converting one and which state has the best employment rate.
With the column chart you have the advantage that if the labels are very long, stretching into multiple words, you can use the bar chart instead. Of course, if you have well understood labels like month names, you can skip alternate labels and keep the labels horizontal itself.
How about putting all of this on the tool tips? Only when the user is interested in getting more info about a data set, he hovers over it and gets all the required information. Your javascript chart stays clean, yet you have given out all the info.
Dig deeper: Learn how to use multi-line tooltips
Without the trendline, the chart would have just been showing the monthly sales for the year and you would have inferred that Q1 was good for you and Q3 was bad. With a simple trendline added to the chart, you can also infer that the sales achieved for most of the months is below the target and you have not met your annual target.
Dig deeper: Learn how to create an intuitive drill-down interface
Which of these tips do you find the most useful? Is there anything else you use for making your charts more usable? Creating interactive php charts is now easy also. Let us continue the discussion in the comments.