Provide an on-ramp

When we talk about data visualizations, we often use a lot of technical terms: granularity, ordinal, ticks, plots, marks, temporal, etc. When writing guidelines it’s easy to jump straight into these details without first establishing the basics. It takes added effort to make guidelines understandable and applicable.

A great example of this can be found in Apple’s guidelines for charts and data.  They explain when to use charts and why they’re a powerful tool. They also make use of “anatomy” illustrations to explain the vocabulary that they use. All of this information makes the guidelines more approachable. If your users aren’t using your guidelines, look at how you on-board people and consider adding an on-ramp.

Apple Chart Components: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/charts

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Written by Alan Wilson