First, I will cover two reasons why visualizing data using maps is often compelling to an audience. Then, I will cover three tips that will help you make the transition from good to exceptional when building map visualizations.

Why Use a Map for a Data Visualization?

It will provide important context to your data.

Let’s start with a hypothetical scenario. It’s your first week on the job and you have been tasked with presenting monthly sales results to the owner of your company. Ron in finance will send you the data and you will put together some slides. Should be a piece of cake. What if you opened up the data file and there was only one number?

Personally, I would hope that Ron in finance was playing some sort of hilarious joke on the new hire. Have you figured out where I am going? Data needs context in order to provide value to the audience. Are sales up or down from prior month? Who are our top sales representatives? How will sales revenue tie into profit? No matter how nice the owner of your company is — if this is the only thing you brought to the meeting it would probably not go well.

Remember those Five Ws? Who, What, Where, When, and Why. This list was created to help journalists figure out the important context on a subject before crafting the story. It works because they are the things the audience would like to know too. Being a journalist and communicating with data are not much different in this sense. Before you craft a data story try plotting the data out on a map. This can quickly solve for where.

Starting at a young age, we have all been exposed to geographical concepts.

Data visualization designer, Ryan Sleeper, writes in his book Practical Tableau, “The power of maps comes from their inherent ability to leverage schemas that your users have been building up for many years.”

This is an enormous advantage in that map visualizations can be quickly interpreted by the audience. Less effort on understanding the visualization design allows for more focus on what the data in the visualization is saying. How long does it take you to decode the first picture vs the second?