Introduction

In a world brimming with data and complexity, the art of presenting information clearly and concisely is more important than ever.

In this article I will give you some tips to master simplicity in your data presentations, ensuring your message is communicated effectively and your insights make a lasting impact.

Easily understood or done

In the realm of data presentation, simplicity means conveying information in an uncluttered, accessible manner. It's about stripping away excess and focusing on what's most important, making it easier for our audience to see the message without unnecessary distractions.

An associated idea when thinking about data communications is clarity, the quality of being coherent and easily understood. Not technically the same - things can be clear yet complex - but they’re related terms that often go hand in hand.

Simplicity and clarity are powerful tools for communicating ideas

You’d think one of the most important things for senior decision makers is to have the right facts on hand to inform their strategy and pick a direction, yet all too often I see information packs and operational reports that are cluttered and unfocused, burying key facts or presenting data that hinders rather than helps telling the story.

Think about a bad presentation slide you’ve seen recently: did its insight leap out to you immediately, and would you have understood its message if there wasn’t someone explaining it to you, pointing at the area you were supposed to focus on?

With a communication like this, we’re often competing to retain the attention of our audience and should do everything we can do to minimise their cognitive strain. The harder it is for them to understand, the more likely they are to switch off – impactful data will go ignored, the communication fails, and valuable time is wasted.

In the words of the Gov.uk design principles, we should “Do the hard work to make it simple”.

“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler”

- Albert Einstein

Tailor the level of complexity to your audience

A favourite quote, attributed to Albert Einstein, goes: “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler”.

It’s a twofold statement: up front it states the primary goal of simplifying things, but then follows with a warning not to go too far - there is a line once crossed that causes things to fail. In data communications it probably means not showing vital facts, dimensions or context, leading to uninformed decisions, or in the audience losing our trust.

OK, let’s say we’ve bought in to the idea of simplifying our communication; how will we know if we’ve gone too far and distilled to the point where it has become meaningless?

Here I will fall back on the classic fence-sitting answer of “it depends”. The key thing is that we must be clear on the purpose of our communication and understand who the audience is. Knowing their personas – their experience, data literacy, technical needs and so on – will be our guide to choosing an appropriate level of complexity.

I’m not advocating an obsessive reduction to Orwellian Newspeak (“good”, “plusgood”), and a drab functional presentation with no ornamentation. Aesthetic is important - if we find a product attractive and polished, we are more likely to engage with and trust it. But that’s a topic for another article.

As a rule of thumb: simplify as far as we can, aiming for the broadest possible understanding across our target audience, but go no further.

Why we fall into the complexity trap

You’d think it would be easy enough to simplify but designers have long struggled with the fight against “too much copy” and there are many reasons why we might fall into the trap of overcomplicating, such as:

Playing it safe: The idea that it’s better to have too much detail than not enough, just in case. We shouldn’t be afraid to let things go, or to shift supporting information to a “more detail” section.
Demonstrating your effort: A single metric might be the best answer, but we need to show our stakeholders just how much effort is going in and they’re getting what they paid for. Quantity over quality.
You are not your audience: It’s easy to forget that we - in the process of creating the communication - have had plenty of time to internalise and deal with the complexity. Our audience, on the other hand, haven’t invested that time and may have mere seconds to interpret what we show them.

It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, but some things to keep in mind as we are tempted to add more detail than perhaps we should.

What can we do to simplify our data communications?

We know what story we are trying to tell, what data we are trying to share, who our audience is, and we’re even feeling brave enough to simplify; so how do we go about it?

Luckily there are many ways to tackle the problem and although each is a topic worthy of its own article (watch this space!), I’ll throw out some ideas that might help.

Progressive disclosure

User experience (UX) designers fight a constant battle with complexity as they aim to create intuitive and easy-to-use products. One approach from their user-centric design toolbox is to hide detail until a user actually needs it.

A familiar example is the info tip - where a user can hover their mouse over something on screen and some helpful information will pop up. Data products are at special risk of drowning their users in numbers and here we use hierarchies and information architecture to help. We might divide content into separate pages, use facets of a dashboard to only show data relevant to the topic at hand, and other interactions to display additional levels of content.

Don’t expose everything up front - reveal complexity on demand.

The journalism pyramid

Related to progressive disclosure is the inverted pyramid framework as used in journalism.

Here we start with the key points that a user can walk away with if they have limited time. Following that is supporting detail and evidence to back up the main story. And finally, for those who need to dig into specifics, we finish with the richest level of detail.

On a presentation slide this idea might be implemented as:

A clear headline title presenting the key insight and call to action…

underneath which we have a longer subtitle section with some key context…

and then a body section with further evidence, perhaps in the form of data visualisation and/or sentence or two.

What about the complexity trap mentioned earlier of being afraid to get rid of stuff? One solution for those reluctant to trim out content is to make use of a “more detail” section. This fits the inverted journalism pyramid idea as it frees us to focus on key story elements up front.

I’m not talking about an appendix, though. In my experience, these sections tend to be used as dumping grounds for workings we don’t want to leave out yet have no home anywhere in the main flow - like an attic cluttered with boxes of curios.

Pictures worth a thousand words

We are visual creatures.

Our brains are hardwired to notice patterns and other visual attributes – originally intended to protect us from predators but now keeping us safe when crossing a busy street, or when interpreting a bar chart.

Icons and pictures can be a great shorthand to hack into the visual processing part of our brains and there are a raft of graphic design tricks we can call on to draw the reader’s eye to what is important - playing with contrast, alignment, white space, etc.

Too many words

I mentioned “too much copy” as a common design challenge but often a simple solution is to just strip out unnecessary words.

We’ve all inwardly groaned when a wall-of-text presentation slide has appeared on screen, filled with bullets and paragraphs. If you’re trying to communicate an idea clearly and succinctly then a short punchy sentence or phrase is likely better than a meandering paragraph.

There’s a time and place for beautiful long form prose, but an impactful data communication probably isn’t it.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve convinced you that simplicity is a powerful ally when it comes to communicating with data. By embracing clarity and paring down the complexity for our audience (without oversimplifying) we can create data stories that resonate and drive informed decisions.

In this case, less really is more.

Less is more: the power of simple data communications