How to Quickly Achieve Chart Clarity, Not Chart Disparity

Published on: 27th October 2015, Updated on: 14th November 2024

Written By:

Andy started at the coal face with eight years in food retailing. Prior to joining MBM he then spent five years in the supply base in positions of category analysis, category management and account management. He works as part of the team enabling suppliers to UK supermarkets to secure more profitable wins through people development. He specialises in Category Management Training and is a qualified HBDI practitioner. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.

Achieve Chart Clarity in Today’s World of Category Management

When using charts and graphs to paint a performance picture or to communicate an important point, it is all to easy to confuse the audience, by over complicating and blurring the message by trying to add far too much detail. A simple rule of thumb should be one observation, one insight and one recommendation. This is the difference between chart clarity, not chart disparity.
The below three images and explanations, show how you can clean things up and get your point across with even more chart clarity:

A great example of what bad looks like…

This chart is trying to communicate many things about something. You can see an overly complicated mess of a chart, that the creator has lovingly made and whom is desperate to communicate many things, when you really need only one insight. To much data, data that is too old, plus a host of unnecessary formatting. The audience will get lost almost immediately, no matter how great the explanation is. Let’s remove many of the elements and see how it improves.

A very complicated chart diagram — This chart is too complicated! It’s trying to convey too much data all at once

Data, simplified, minus some ‘noise’…

Better, but, what is the key message that needs to be taken away?

Two Line graphs for the last 12 months on one chart — This chart is better than the previous one, but it can be simpler

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It is better, many of the unnecessary elements are gone, including the data table (why show the same data twice?). The different chart types have been removed, we no longer have bars, lines and area charts all within the same graph. The title is still an issues, it is basically just telling us what the chart is showing, we can already see that, so it’s a waste.

Same data with a much better title…

A simple one series line chart — Finally, a perfect example of a simple chart that is effective

Bingo! – the audience now gets it. ‘Promotions lead to new customers that continue buying – lets do another promotion’. We now have chart clarity not chart disparity.