A year into Revisual Labs' existence (circa Aug 2024), our agency's founder (and my colleague) Gurman Bhatia sent me a link to Kuhu Gupta's talk at Outlier 2024. Kuhu walks us through the concept of micro-visualisations—tiny data visualisations that pack a punch when it comes to conveying and contextualising information. I remember taking stock of all the micro-visualisations we'd made for our projects until then (albeit unaware of this moniker), and resolving to create more for our future projects.
Fast-forward to Feb 2025, and I got to present a talk at UX Now about micro-visualisations, microcopy, and their relevance to UX designers. Although this time, my deck almost exclusively showcased examples from a range of projects by me and my team at Revisual Labs. This is something that made Gurman and I incredibly happy, since we tend to use a fair share of external examples in talks and training engagements—but this time, they were mostly ours.
When invited to speak at the conference, I chose this topic because while UX design is a key pillar of any digital information design product (be it a data story or a dashboard), the reverse can rarely be proclaimed. However, I truly believe that information design can confer SO much value to UX designers by helping them shape how people see and process information. Here are some short excerpts from my talk:
Yes, it's Data 'Visualisation', but…
People may forget numbers, but they always remember stories. As much a chart's data and visual design matters, it will seldom work if its insight is not communicated well. In most cases, the chart should, on its own, tell the story. It is best practice to treat a chart as a standalone piece. Imagine a chart from a data story being embedded elsewhere; would it work without any additional context that once surrounded it?
This is where an insightful chart title, a "boring research paper" subheading, annotations, and clear labels matter. For example, let's look at this simple chart from our data story for UNHCR:
The chart has been architected to have clean X- and Y-axis labels, tick marks corresponding to the most significant years, annotations that spell out important trends (the area within a chart is not sacred space—make use of it!) and external causalities, and an insightful chart title. The title is our first and most important point of interaction with a reader—it hooks them by providing an overarching insight, which then prompts them to want to examine further nuances of the chart.
Copy is a design element; not an afterthought
Tooltips, modals, alerts—these are small UI elements, but their microcopy is just as important as their visual design. Take tooltips, for example. It is common practice to simply display the data pertaining to a particular metric corresponding as numerical values and nothing else (e.g., the tooltip to the left in the image above). But what if it spoke to the reader and not at them? The tooltip to the right does that by narrating the metric instead. By doing so, it reinforces the year, the technicality of the metric (% of individuals), and the indicator they are examining (CKD). There is potential to create better user experiences even within the smallest of components.