Infographics are one of the growing trends in presenting data and information. The idea is to take data and information and make it bright, colorful and pictorial. Often it is trying to bridge the fields of data analysts, marketing and visual graphics. By bridging these fields, they try to produce products that catch people’s attention, make them want to engage with the information and often help them make decisions or come to conclusions. Overall, they want to make the data approachable and usable.

In many respects, the goals of these infographics are the same as what we try to do as evaluators. We too are trying to produce data products that our funders, clients and stakeholders can use. We want our evaluation findings to catch their attention. We want them to engage with the evaluation results. We want them make decisions and changes based on the information that come from our work. Overall, we too want to make the evaluation data approachable and usable.

I think that in many respects the use of infographics, if done well, can further extend the reach and influence of our evaluations. For instance, I have been in charge of doing a large scale student survey in Wyoming for several years now. In 2008, I created for each county and school district a two-page, graphical fact sheet along with a larger and more comprehensive survey report. After releasing these products, I had the opportunity to interact with community members, prevention specialist and stakeholders about the survey results. Almost invariably when I did so, the data product that the community members pulled out were the factsheets and not the report. They liked the factsheets because they were short, and simple. They also had graphs that were relatively easy to understand. I cannot say that they were as fancy and graphical as most infographics, but it did show the power of accessible summaries.

The problem comes in the fact that infographics often want to emphasize the attention getting features of their presentation over and above what is considered good practices of displaying data. For instance, someone obviously spent a large amount of time creating this infographic:

The silhouettes of the different monuments and the amount of data packed into this chart are impressive. I know for myself it draws me in and makes me want to learn more.

However, as soon as I start looking at the graph I get lost. The graph presents the percentage rise and percentage fall in prices. It also displays the average hotel room cost in each city. When I try to track a given “ray” back to its “axis,” I invariably get lost and cannot tell what value the ray actually represents. It also raises questions like, how do I interpret the fact that the width of each ray gets bigger the farther it is away from the center point? Is there any interpretation of the height the different monuments? How did they choose the values to emphasize at the bottom of the graphic?

It quickly occurred to me that splitting this information into two bar graphs, one for the percentage change and one for the prices would vastly simplify and clarify the message. It would also help, in an electronic version to link to a table containing the values of this graph so that user can find the exact values. If it was a print version, the table could be printed on the back of the paper.

In the preparation of this article, I looked at many different infographics. I found that there some infographics that are better than others. However, what I also noticed is that it often took me much longer to understand many of the infographics than it would if the data were presented in a simple graph or table. A particularly notable trend is the use of circles to portray the data. This is despite the fact that Pie Charts and Ray Charts are so often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Almost invariably, if something could be portrayed as a bar chart, line chart or rectangular area chart, they would change it to something that is curved or even triangular shaped.

There may be many other concerns about infographics. For instance, many infographics are biased and are simply being used for marketing purposes. They also often do not identify their sources and it is next to impossible to make a judgment about how reliable and valid are the data.

Setting those legitimate concerns behind, I must admit that I also have my concerns about how usable they may appear at first glance against how usable they actually are. At first they seem to be a major step forward in making our evaluation results accessible and usable. However in practice, I am afraid that the most current practices obscure and distort a lot more than they illuminate and explain.

Let me know what you think of infographics? Are there any techniques, and presentations that your find particularly effective and straightforward when trying to create infographics or other similar summary materials? How do you balance the need to grab people’s attention with the need to present the data in a clear and unambiguous form?