Practical Tableau

Chapter 94. Tip #9: Provide Visual Context

Content is king, but context is God.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Context is useful in data visualization because it helps you avoid the dreaded question, “So what?” As powerful and simple as they are, fundamental chart types such as bar charts and line graphs are often used in a vacuum. Lack of context makes it difficult for an end user to understand, engage, and eventually take action. By building context into the visuals themselves, you help the stories in the data emerge, even if you aren’t there to explain them.

For this reason, context helps us tell both types of stories discussed in the introduction to this section. If you as the visualization creator know the endgame, you can use context to make your story stand out and “stick.” If you are building a self-service interactive data visualization, adding in context will help your end users analyze the data and find the storylines that are most relevant to them.

In Chapter 92, I shared some recommendations for what to provide at the top of a dashboard. There are several ways to add context to the rest of the dashboard including:

• Index scores (covered in Chapter 61); not only do these scores provide comparisons, they help normalize the data.

• Sparklines (covered in Chapter 24); this chart type is essentially a small set of line graphs that allow you to view high-level trends across several metrics at the same time.

• Bullet graphs (covered in Chapter 26); this chart type is a variation on ...