Elizabeth Ricks has started a series on improving a particular visual:
I empathize with the plight of this anonymous creator. In previous roles, I frequently created visuals that looked like this, and was left frustrated when requests came back for “more data.” I slowly came to realize that I was assigning my audience the tedious task of figuring out for themselves what the takeaways were. My visuals should have been highlighting the interesting things to those seeing them for the first time. The five questions we’ll be discussing in this series will help us to do just that.
The first question in the series is, “What elements can I eliminate?” I think that’s a really good idea—with data visualization, less is more.