You just finished collecting all of your survey responses, made some initial analysis and now you're ready create a killer presentation that will "wow" your boss and solicit "Ohs and "Aahs" from your peers. But, how can you pick the best charts and graphs to represent your survey data? In a world of information overload it's important to choose the right visualizations for your data set. You need to create visualizations that will make it easy to focus on the data that is important. Here are some examples of charts and graphs that you can create from your Zoomerang survey data and show the insights that matter.
Pie Charts:
The trusty pie chart is a great option when all of your answers add up to 100%. It is a great chart choice for displaying proportions of data. Pie charts work well with multiple choice questions where only one answer is allowed. The downside of a pie chart is the more slices of pie you include, the harder it is to visually discriminate the the values in the pie. It is important to label percentages on each slice of pie so the viewer can easily see the proportions. Varying the shades of color can also help the user visualize the percentage totals of responses.
Tip: Pies are great for 1-answer multiple choice questions.
Example 1. This chart created in excel illustrates the labeling challenges with pie charts. Seven labels are too many to fit onto each slice of the pie.
Example 2. A better example of an excel pie chart uses 2 values and is much easier to visualize the parts that make up the whole.
Bar charts:
The most common way to visualize data is through a bar chart. Bar charts are simple and easy to understand the distribution of survey responses when you are comparing a set of values. The bars make it easy to spot a statistically significant answer and also accommodate several answer options. A question with 10- 15 answers and varying answer counts can easily be displayed. Unlike pie charts, bar charts are not required to add up to a fixed value of 100. When labeling bar charts use counts rather than percentages.
Tip: Use bar charts for many answers multiple choice questions.
Example 3. Simple bar chart created in excel.
Bubble charts
Bubble charts make an excellent choice when answer options which have a high degree distribution in their frequency. These charts show the relationship of values based on circle area. Bubble charts also allow you to display hundreds of individual values at once. Free visualization tools like Tableau Public http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/public and Many Eyes (http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/ ) let you create cool bubble chart visualizations you can publish online and share with others.
Tip: Bubble charts are great for displaying a large distribution of answer values.
Example 4. Bubble chart created with Many Eyes.
Heat Maps:
A heat maps uses color to display 2-dimensional data in a tree format. You can use the area to signify the answer frequency and a color to represent the scale. These type of charts work well with ratings questions using a 5 or 10 point scales. Heat maps are not always offered in common charting software but it is easy to create your own in powerpoint or illustrator by creating a simple table and assigning colors to the cell background.
Tip: Heat maps are useful to display likert scaled questions and 2-dimensional datasets.
Example 5.This heat map is an example of charts created with the interactive charting solution FusionCharts http://www.fusioncharts.com/powercharts/gallery/#heat-map
Word clouds:
In the last few years, word clouds have become an increasingly popular visualization tool for large amounts of text. Word clouds show frequencies of words visually. The most common words are displayed larger, while the less frequent words appear smaller. Word clouds are a fun and attractive way to display words from survey comments and open ended text questions. There are several free word cloud tools online including wordle http://www.wordle.net and tagcrowd http://tagcrowd.com/.
Tip: Word clouds are great for showing the diversity and frequency in comments and open ended text
Example 6.Word cloud created in Wordle based on the paragraph above.
Get Inspired:
Need some visualization inspiration for your next presentation? Check out David McCandless, a data journalist and visual designer in his wonderful Ted Talks presentation . David McCandless specializes in creating beautiful visualizations of complex data sets. His example of a tree diagram of Global spending called the Billion-dollar-o-gram is a great example displaying a complex data set. Hopefully your survey results are a little less complicated.
In addition to the custom charts and graphs available within Zoomerang, pro and premium subscribers can easily download raw data from survey results to a .CSV file. Doing so allows you the option of using that data to create some of the more exotic visualizations listed above.
What is your favorite visualization for displaying survey data? pie, bar, heat maps, word clouds? We would love to hear your feedback in the comment section below.
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