Trendlines Are Rarely Improvements
At the 2018 Magnet Nursing conference in Denver, I saw many improvement posters using line or bar charts with an added trend line to show improvement. Unfortunately, few of the trends were valid. Here’s why:
At the 2018 Magnet Nursing conference in Denver, I saw many improvement posters using line or bar charts with an added trend line to show improvement. Unfortunately, few of the trends were valid. Here’s why:
The June, 2016 HRB article by Scott Berinato examines how to use charts and diagrams to express ideas and statistics. I agree with Anmol Garg, Tesla data scientist quoted in the article, “You can’t find anything looking at spreadsheets and querying databases. It has to be visual.”
Bernato says: “Convenient is a tempting replacement for good, but it will lead to charts that are merely adequate or, worse, ineffective.” He separates visualizations into four components: idea generation, idea illustration, visual discovery and everyday dataviz. Simple line, bar and pie charts are great for idea generation and illustration, but terrible for visual discovery and dataviz.