Hello. Welcome to part five of the course which is the last part of the course where we deal with diagrams and data visualization. And when I say diagrams I mean chart like diagrams, questions of terminology. Boxes and arrows and data visualization of course box charts, pie charts, white charts, etc. So, let's begin with kinds of diagrams that we have. Now, according to PowerPoint, the leading expert in the area, there are eight different kinds of diagrams and the first diagram on their list is list, [LAUGH] weird enough. And a list is not a diagram. If you look at it really closely, you will see that most of what they have on that list is not actually a diagram. Some of it is process, some of it is relationships, some of them is indeed a list but a list is not a diagram, it's still a list. Now, if you want a better list, I encourage you to use pictograms. And do not try to glorify your list with artificial smart art. It is still a list. So a list is not a diagram process. Is a legitimate kind of a diagram. Cycle however is not because it's just a cyclical process. Hierarchy is a diagram, relationship is a diagram, matrix is a table, pyramid is another kind of relationship or hierarchical, diagram and picture is also non-diagram is a picture. So we are down to three and we would cover in this course we would cover three different kinds of diagrams, hierarchical, process, and relationships. Now, before we dive in, let me say few things in general. Good diagrams are expensive. You will spend I don't know, 20 minutes to an hour or maybe sometimes two trying to create a good diagram. So think twice before committing. Do we really need that diagram? As a consultant I sometimes receive slides like this. People ask me to improve it, I ask myself well what's the problem, and there's a number of problems. Way too much color that's too much the creation, readability is quiet poor and then I go first like this. I remove this fake 3D, then I ask myself whether the background is really necessary. I remove the background, and I ask myself whether the arrow is necessary. I remove the arrow then, I change colors to something more humane. And then, I play with alignments and maybe try to replace fills with boarders and then I realized my God a Gantt chart. This was a Gantt chart. It's not really chart. It's a table. What we need is a table in this particular instance. I create a table and. And I think a table is a much better solution than a chart. We do not need to spend 20 minutes with all those boxes trying to align them together. All we need is a table. So no, you don't always need a chart. I think this is the question you should be asking yourself. All the time when you work with charts, that is. So this one works when you have five engineers locked up in a confined space. But this wouldn't work for a much bigger audience. If 500 people at a conference, I don't think you should be showing stuff like that, so please don't. This would work much better, or maybe even something like this. I know it's not the same information, but ask yourself whether the goals you're setting for yourself are achievable with this particular audience. They will not be, if there's 500 people in the audience they will not be able to understand the chart which is that complex. So charts do not work for the audiences, keep that in mind. Next question is what will they do differently after seeing the chart? I know we are using charts to explain. But okay, suppose we've explained everything we needed to explain. How that would influence people's decision making in real life situations? What will we do differently after seeing the chart? And well I think this is a great example of a probably useless chart, because it wasn't created with the end user in line, it's for the fire inspector not for the actual employee of the actual company. And first thing we need to do with this chart we need to dim everything, and then we need to place the user of the chart somewhere on the chart. And that will make the chart slightly less informative, but slightly more useful. We need to guide the people in decision making, this is what I think the charts are all about. This is not just about explaining stuff, this is about helping in real life situations. And once you've decided that, yes this is the decision that I want my audience to make, it's all about contrast and focus. You need to understand, what things are really important on the chart. And how do I separate them, from one another and from the background, from the rest of the information. This chart has, I don't know. Not enough focus and this chart probably has way too many colors and, thus, way too many focal points. And we need to find this optimal place somewhere in between. And I think what we need is like three to five bright points on the chart. The whole chart should not be bright and it should not be just black and white either, so general rules for creating diagrams. First things first, why do we need the diagram? Do we really need the diagram, because this is a huge investment of your time. You will spend 20 minutes, an hour, maybe sometimes two hours, creating a diagram. Secondly, once you've decided, yes, there's absolutely no way I can do about it. What's the key message? What's the decision? What is the question we're trying to answer with this chart? How are we helping people in their real life situations? Thing number three, we would need to create 3 to 5 focal points on the chart, what are they? And thing number four, can we remove or dim, move to background, everything else that we have on the chart, colors, connecting lines, I don't know, fills, borders, can we remove everything to make the most important content stand out?
