Tenet is a principle honored by a group of a people. As a reader of this blog, you work with data and data visualization is an important element in your day-to-day work. So, to help you build effective data visualization, I created the tenets below which are simple to follow. This work is based on multiple sources and I’ll reference it below.

Five Tenets for effective data visualization:

1. We will strive to understand customer needs
2. We will tell the truth
3. We will bias for simplicity
4. We will pick the right chart
5. We will select colors strategically

Examples for each tenet is listed below:

• We will strive to understand customer needs

Defining and knowing your audience is very important before diving into the other tenets. Doing this will increase your probability of delivering an effective data visualization.

h/t to Mike Rubin for suggesting this over on LinkedIn here

• We will tell the Truth

We won’t be dishonest with data. See an example below where Fox news deliberately started the bar chart y-axis at a non-zero number to make the delta look way higher than it actually is.

Source: Link

• We will bias for Simplicity

3-D charts increase complexity for the end-users. So we won’t use something like this and instead opt for simplicity.

• We will pick the right chart

I have linked some resources here

• We will select colors strategically

In this post, I shared five tenets that will help you build effective data visualization.