Data Is There. Charts Are There. Decisions Aren’t. Where We Lose Meaning in Visualisation

In many teams, data visualisation comes down to choosing chart types — bar or pie charts — and selecting colours. Reports look neat, the data is correct, yet the business still doesn’t understand what to do with it.

In the talk, I suggest looking at visualisation not as data decoration, but as a decision-making tool. We’ll explore why meaning is often lost even before the first chart even appears, and why no “beautiful visualisation” can help if it’s unclear which management decision should be made based on the report.
I'll show where we most often go wrong:

• designing reports without understanding the decision context,
• answering the question “what does the data look like?” instead of “what is important to notice here?”,
• discussing chart types and techniques instead of meaning and focus.