Struggling with ideas on how to present your data...walk away.

For today’s short story visualisation, I decided to focus on the news that the Coronavirus isolation period was set to increase from 7 to 10 days. The simplest way to show this would be to use a bar chart with two bars - a before bar showing 7 and an after bar showing 10. I love a simple visualisation but I wanted to find something equally simple but a bit more pleasurable to look at. 

My initial idea was to do something with a circle, analogous to a clock given we’re talking about time. I spent around 30 minutes mulling over different ideas in my head and searching for inspiration online. I had an idea but I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. So rather than spend more time thinking, or settle for something I wasn’t happy with, instead I decided to walk away.

Walking away from a problem isn’t always the best advice, but I find when struggling for inspiration when creating a data visualisation, or presentation, going to do something else and letting your subconscious brain churn away at it instead can work wonders and it means that when you’re ready to return to it, invariably new ideas will crop up.

How long should you walk away? I think it depends. Sometimes just 15 minutes will do, other times it might be a whole day or week. Today, for me, it was 15 minutes. I put my laptop down and went to talk to my family about other things. And when I then returned to my laptop, I suddenly had the realisation that for this visualisation I wasn’t talking about time as in hours (which the clock analogy works for), I instead was talking about days, and therefore I needed a calendar analogy. I pictured someone in isolation looking at their calendar and counting down the days until they could go out again. And that’s how I ended up with today’s visualisation.

It's still a simple visualisation, but an effective one to demonstrate the truth and growth in my data story.

For more of my growing collection of short stories, click here.