NO-DATA INK

It has been a really long time since the last post and lots has changed in my professional life. I have taken the last (almost!) 2 years to adjust to my new role and immerse myself in dashboard building business.

It is high time to come back and with new energy continue posting about data visualization. You can expect though a slight change in focus. It will be certainly more general, more focused on commercial visualizations, less on presenting science results. But fear not – you will still find the content relevant, though probably in a less obvious way. Ready? Let’s go!

This post’s focus is “no-data ink”. I first heard this term in the first year of my PhD and, as I am a minimalist at heart, I fell deeply in love with it. If you think about it this should have probably been the first thing to write about.

The term “no-data ink” is pretty self-explanatory. It is part of your visualization that does not contain any information, or in other words it’s all the ink that can be removed without any loss of information. Let me demonstrate:

All panels are part of Drerup et al. 2017

For the dashboard example I use something that I have created myself, reflecting what I see quite commonly with customers. Those dashboards were created using Tableau CRM, a Salesforce product.

So what is a no-data ink in those examples? Let me highlight it:

Scientific figure

Dashboard

None of those red lines contains actual data. Why is it there, then? Some of it was added to help readers read the values (see my previous post on grid lines); some as a beautifying feature; and probably the most common answer: it was a default in the software that was used to make the graph.

So why would you put effort into removing it? Well because it is a major distraction. Our eyes are contrast catchers. Everything that is contrasting is driving attention and the only thing that is a stronger distractor is movement! So, if the contrast in my visualization is between background and the outline that’s where my attention goes. Removing it drives focus back to the actual number.

See what happens when I clean those graphs: 

 To sum this up: it takes effort to make the graph look minimalistic. It is worth it though as data and numbers hate distraction. We are not good at remembering numbers, especially when they are thrown at us in bulk. So make sure the number is the hero in your visualization with no side-kicks in the form of no-data ink.