Make People Fall in Love with Your Data: A Practical Tutorial for Data Visualization and UI Design

Part 1 – Visualization Principles and Best Practices Overview

People think visually. However, most of the tools that today’s information workers use actually confuse our natural visual interpretation skills. In the first part of our tutorial, we will share practical guidance that makes data presentation more effective, engaging, and valuable. Some of the topics we’ll be discussing include information layout and workflow, information visualization, chart selection, and styling. We’ll show real-life examples to demonstrate how applying these best practices enables charting laymen to work like visualization ninjas.

Part 2 – Design Principles of Dashboards and Interactive Applications

The second part of the tutorial will focus on best practices for applying visualization principles when designing web-based dashboards and other analytical tools. We will describe how to gradually reveal information as users express interest, how to make the tough decisions about what information should be shown, and offer guidance on creating workflows that support users’ needs. Information-rich applications share many common features—we will discuss when to include these features and proven approaches for making them valuable for your users.

Part 3 – Practical Application: Case Study

The final section of the tutorial will bring together the lessons on design to show how they are applied in a real-world example. We will demonstrate the process for translating client requirements into a full interface design. We will discuss topics including: 1) understanding specific end-user needs and data requirements; 2) determining key features and functionality for the interface; 3) styling choices to create the final UI composites.