The Data Product Ecosystem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 172

4. Review process to maintain quality control. Your organization should set
expectations for the quality of data products that are used to communicate
your valuable data and share insights. The costs—confusion, frustration,
wasted time, and misleading information—are not worth tolerating poor
design. The skilled designers, armed with the documented guidance, may
form a review board to evaluate and provide feedback on the design of
data products in your organization.
START WITH A STYLE GuIDE
Good design builds on consistent, fundamentally sound choices and learns
from the quality work of others. This is where your organization can start its
efforts to improve data presentation design.
In our experience, an effective first step is to create a style guide for the pre-
sentation of data. It can be modeled after the branding style guides that many
large organizations create to ensure a consistent presentation of content in
print and online. Your style guide should provide data product authors with
direction on choice of colors, typography, chart selection, and number format-
ting. The document provides examples of well-designed data visualizations
and sets the rules for legends and labeling. In Appendix B, we have included
an outline for such a style guide along with examples of the content.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” said Charles Caleb Colton. Your
data product designers should have a standard style guide and set of illus-
trative data products they can reference to understand quality norms and
the expectations of organizational leaders. To do so, select a few examples
of dashboards or reports that set a high bar. Find opportunities to publicly
present these data products—setting a standard for clarity and content.
DEVELOP
There are dozens of technology solutions for developing data products.
Microsoft offers a variety of options: PowerPoint for data-rich presentations,
Excel for models and ad hoc analysis, Power BI for self-service analytics, SQL
Server Reporting Services for reporting, SharePoint with dashboards, and
undoubtedly many more. The fact that one organization offers numerous