Constructing and Evaluating Your Design Solution - Data Visualization: A Successful Design Process - page 167

Try to see this as the final push. Paying attention to the finer details of your work
will safeguard the project's integrity (and by extension your own, as the designer).
Hopefully, much of the user-testing and evaluation work outlined just before will
help in the identification of any problems in accuracy. People with a freshness of
perspective can often provide great value on this front.
Whether it is them or you looking for these characteristics, here are a few things you
need to watch out for:
• Data and statistical accuracy : Scan through a good-sized sample of all your
visualized data values to ensure there aren't any erroneous items or incorrect
outliers. Check the rigor of all your statistics and calculations.
• Visualization accuracy : Make sure that the way you have represented your
data is functioning effectively and does not mislead the user or reader. Do
all your representation choices accurately portray the data values they're
associated with?
• Functional accuracy : More concerned with interactive pieces—do all the
functions and features on your design perform as you intended?
• Visual inference : As we stated before, visual inference should equal
data inference. If it looks like data, it should be data. If something looks
significant, maybe through its positioning or color choice, then it should
be significant. If there is any decorative element or other artifact that
appears to be implying something it is not meant to, remove it.
• Formatting accuracy : Check the consistency of your typography, in terms
of type, style, and size. Make sure your color usage is consistent down to
the RGB or CMYK code level.
• Annotation accuracy : Read through all your titles, labels, introductory text,
credits, captions, and check any units that you have included. It's not just
about spelling or grammatical errors but checking to see if things make
sense and are succinctly expressed.
Post-launch evaluation
The exciting and also probably anxious moment has arrived and your visualization
has now been launched in to the wild!
How, where, and what this launch actually looks like clearly covers a very broad
range of possibilities—it might be a chart in a report, a presentation to a board
meeting, an infographic in a newspaper, or an interactive web-based project.