What are the best ways to teach data visualization without design experience?

I think is very important to differentiate between design and aesthetics. Whilst the former focuses in how people will interact with your product, the latter is mostly subjective (with the exception of a few principles). In my opinion, what defines a good design will be your user and therefore, before jumping into the technicalities of Data Viz, you should read on design thinking phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

In my experience this approach has always helped to train a team in data visualization without an experience in design principles. 1. Start by teaching what is storytelling and how to cater to various audiences. 2. Tell them upfront the pitfalls while creating visual storytelling 3. Create a simple style guide to follow so there is consistency and gives the confidence that what they are doing is right (takes away the fear of judgements ) and they try to think beyond the basics and will express their design thoughts on top of the template 4. Get them involved in data visualization communities so even if they don’t participate they will look at the visual storytelling on their feeds daily , which subconsciously gets them prepared

Start with easy and user-friendly data visualization tools like Excel, Power BI, or online platforms such as Datawrapper. These tools are designed to be easy for beginners, as they often come with pre-built templates, guidance, and user-friendly interfaces that can help individuals without design experience create effective data visualizations.

When I started on data visualization , tableau public was the most accessible tool - free of cost and has a great community to back it up My approach was 1. Download the tool and get the look and feel of it so you get comfortable 2. Go through the inbuilt help trainings 3. Create very basic charts and calculations 4. Join a community and form buddies so you can learn together 5. Reverse engineer others work 6. Create your own work and share it across and get feedbacks ( be open to constructive feedbacks ) 7. Be consistent 8. Practice and practice 9. As you get more confident start trying complex visualizations, lengthier stories and tricky calculations These steps can be followed in any medium or tool of your choice

Throw the word "design" out of your vocabulary. You don't need to be a trained graphic designer to create compelling data visualizations. Remember to keep it simple. Most of the time, a line or column chart is suitable. Avoid too many datasets. Adhere to your company's brand guidelines when choosing color and font.

In the world of visuals, the opportunities, potential pitfalls, and best practices are nearly endless. There is one concept that has never failed though: relativity. Whether you are showing a single number or a complex 3-D chart, you HAVE to provide context behind the visualization. Here are two examples: Incomplete: "This piece of content has been viewed 100,000 times" Complete: "This piece of content has been viewed 100,000 times in its first month. An average of 3,000 views a day makes this media the lowest-performing of all our content this quarter; a record formerly held by THIS other piece of content. The first example is providing raw data while the second provides information.

I believe the key is to focus on best practices and the story that needs to be told. We can also suggest sites like Pinterest, Behance, etc to get design inspiration. Tableau has an inspiring gallery of work on display that can always be a reference point for students or beginners.

Makeover Monday was the best tool for helping me improve my data visualization skills. Each week, you get a dataset that was visualized by another company in a news article. You are then tasked to analyze why that viz doesn't work, make a better one, and submit. The creators of Makeover Monday host a live session where they give feedback on each submission.

This is the most important one practicing and getting feedbacks in data visualization learning is like a superpower for getting better at it. It helps you become more skilled at creating cool visuals, teaches you where you’re going wrong, so you can fix it, and makes your data pictures way more interesting and easy to understand. It also makes you think smarter about design and data, boosts your confidence, and gets you ready for the real world, so you can impress everyone with your data skills!

Constantly using different charts and slightly tweaking your objective, for example, instead of using a pie chart to break down your expenses in the category, why not try using a waffle chart and enable additional top 3 expenses in the category in respective waffle chart and have the amount or summary as per below, so that we able to learn easily that which 3 are the top expenses with percentage instead of hover to the pie chart to see the annotation.

To me, it boils down to developing a data visualization that's right for the data and the audience. Understanding what the audience needs and then designing for it and getting feedback after will help you design an intuitive visualization. Sometimes design comes as a result of that process.

After you have decided on the central idea you want to communicate, use KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid). Sometimes, I have tried to commumicate too much in a single visualization thinking that this is a masterpiece but the audience (even experts) don't see the central insight immediately, so I had to steer them towards my idea. Ideally, a good visualization should not require additional explanation.