In spring 2025, I livestreamed on YouTube as I created a 2-pager about NIH grant terminations.

Later, Michelle Grochocinski emailed me and wrote, “I applied your lessons to a two-page infographic fact sheet for the State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP). The leaked HHS budget draft suggested cutting SHIP funding, and advocates mobilized quickly to highlight the importance of this program. (I could’ve kept tweaking the fact sheet forever, probably, but we wanted to get it out asap.) Thank you for the tools!”

Here’s what Michelle created:

I LOVED how she applied what she learned to her own project, and asked if she’d be willing to share it with you here.

Ann Emery: What did the “before” version look like?

Michelle Grochocinski: The “before” version was four pages of neutral program trends and contextual information; there wasn’t a clear audience.

The revised fact sheet is two pages of infographics and information that explicitly highlight program impact.

How long did it take to create the Fact Sheet?

The better part of two days.

We went through several versions before landing on the data points, visualizations, and stories that we agreed best illustrate the importance of the program.

Which software program(s) did you use?

Excel for the data.

PowerPoint for the page design.

How did you decide which data points to include?

We considered many more data points than were ultimately selected.

We identified our audience as consumers / constituents, who may not realize this is a federally-funded service, and the legislature. We chose demographic data that would emphasize to lawmakers that constituents on both sides of the aisle rely on this program, such as numbers and stories about higher-income and rural customers.  

I approached this with the hypothetical of “what would happen if SHIP weren’t available?” Immediately, the challenges of unsolved issues, trouble navigating coverage options, and lack of access to unbiased information came to mind. I worked backwards to select information that illustrates how SHIP meets these needs.

I consulted with colleagues in my program area and from my communications team to get fresh perspectives.

What do you like most about the Fact Sheet?

I feel we did a good job clearly and concisely communicating SHIP’s impact: empowering thousands of families and communities to understand and access their healthcare.

I believe the fact sheet shows how this is a popular, non-partisan program that helps all of us, including congressional offices and government partners.

We strove to use Reframe Aging principles in our verbiage and plain language.

It’s clean and succinct.

Did you run into any challenges?

I found myself wanting to insert my many graphs into the fact sheet. Pivoting to graphics and design that highlight the ultimate impact rather than trends over time took a mental shift, from program manager to consumer.

Selecting which data points to include amongst the vast amounts of data we collect was challenging.

Finding the right balance of context to provide without delving into complexities that require background knowledge and jargon was tricky.

Next steps??

I’ll keep tweaking the colors and formatting to polish it up.

I this it would be beneficial to have a national version of this state fact sheet, since SHIP is a national program, so I’m interested in working with my federal colleagues to make that happen.

Great work, Michelle! Here’s the before-after transformation. –Ann

The post Designing a 2-Page Infographic: Behind the Scenes with Michelle Grochocinski appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

If you work in global health as I do, that statement needs no explanation.

For anyone who is not sure what I mean by that: when I took the class, a key challenge was trying to synthesize and summarize abundant global health data into actionable information products. I fretted about how to convince colleagues to use our project’s branding and data visualization guidelines, how to get them to attach the label to the line on a line graph rather than in a legend somewhere else on the graph. I took for granted the global health resources like the Demographic Health Surveys.

A few months after taking the course, USAID was dismantled, and funding was slashed for many other federal government agencies. Dozens and dozens of my friends and former colleagues lost their jobs.

Meanwhile, much of the hyperbolic hype around AI makes it seem like all knowledge workers are going to be replaced soon.

In this climate, it might seem superfluous to talk about tips and tricks for making reports more appealing.

I’ll offer two examples of useful things I learned during the course, one simple and one more theoretical.

Fewer Colors

The first is simple but powerful.

I admired the clean design that I saw in Ann’s communications.

My designs, in comparison, seemed too cluttered.

During the class I realized that it was because Ann uses a limited color palette and largely uses colors gradations in graphs rather than using many different colors.

Templates to Create Structure

I decided to take Report Redesign because I was being asked to help write and design policy briefs, but I had never learned how to do that.

I thought the course would empower me to make suggestions– even though it wasn’t exactly the focus of the course – and it did!

The course materials included templates, and the tutorials explained how to create templates. It is a huge time-saver to start with template rather than developing each product from the blank page. 

Using those as inspiration, I developed simple PowerPoint templates and an accompanying worksheet to help teams brainstorm their key messages and decide how to present them visually.

My team has shared these resources during several webinars, and colleagues have said that they appreciated the straightforward guidance. 

I am glad I took the Report Redesign class, and I would encourage others to take it as well.

There will always be a need to communicate data clearly and accurately.

The class is a great balance of theory and practice.

The time allotted is enough to learn hands-on skills but still a reasonable time commitment for people with full-time jobs.

Connect with Emma Williams

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-williams-7144aa7/

The post Fewer Colors & Report Templates by Emma Williams appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

For me, it was discovering pivot tables and their ability to run circles around painstaking formula execution.

What are Pivot Tables?

Simply put, pivot tables sort a contiguous array of quantitative data by multiple planes of information simultaneously.

This is an example of a contiguous dataset (with pretend data). All the cells are touching/sharing a border.

After you fiddle with the rows (x axis)/ columns (y axis)/ values (summary), filters (sorting)… Tah da! The magic happens. 

Here’s how quickly you can summarize data with pivot tables:

Improving Your Interactive Dashboards

To build professional and reliable interactive dashboards, pivot tables are your best friend.

As a data designer who’s recently completed Ann K. Emery’s Dashboard Design course, I’m excited to share three techniques that have elevated my dashboard game. 

(1) Helper Tables

First, I’ve learned the value of creating “helper tables.”

Think of these as your dashboard’s backbone.

While pivot tables are constantly shifting as users interact with filters and slicers, helper tables provide a stable foundation for your key metrics.

I create these on a dedicated ‘Ref’ sheet, where they quietly but efficiently pull data from the pivot tables using direct cell references (=).

(2) Consistent Cell References

Second, cell references need to be consistent.

By using absolute references (=$row$column), I ensure my helper tables always pull exactly what I need, regardless of how the underlying pivot table shifts and sorts.

(3) Naming Pivot Tables

Third, name your pivot tables intuitively!

Sure, Excel is happy to call them “PivotTable1,” “PivotTable2,” and so on, but meaningful names make maintenance so much easier. (Just remember: no spaces allowed!)

Organizing Your Dashboard Spreadsheets

My finished dashboards now follow a clean, organized structure with five key sheets:

1. Overview (where users find instructions)
2. Data (the raw information, typically hidden)
3. Pivot (where the magic happens, also hidden)
4. Dashboard (the beautiful final product)
5. Ref (my helper tables’ home)

Dashboards Need Functionality and Performance

One of the most valuable lessons from Ann’s course was learning to balance functionality with performance.

Multiple pivot tables can strain Excel’s resources, but with these techniques, I can create sophisticated dashboards that remain lightning-fast and reliable.

What started as a simple appreciation for pivot table magic has grown into a comprehensive approach to creating dynamic, professional dashboards that my clients love.

Your Turn

What’s your favorite pivot table trick?

I’d love to hear how you’re using these powerful tools in your own work!

Connect with Anna Pfaff

Reach out to guest author Anna Pfaff on LinkedIn.

The post 3 Ways to Elevate Your Pivot Tables and Dashboards in Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Are you sharing the replays with attendees?

Captions increase the accessibility of our recordings, making it easier for attendees with hearing issues, audio/tech glitches, and non-English speakers to follow our ideas.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about embedded captions with Sue Griffey.

(Embedded captions means that the captions are “stuck” or “burned” inside the video file itself, not as an extra button that viewers have to remember to click.)

Resources Mentioned

https://www.descript.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go.

And in this video, you’ll learn about embedded captions from Sue Griffey.

All right. This is a, a progression of how I’ve done in captioning as Ann, working with Ann over the last four years, made me more and more aware of accessibility. And LinkedIn also, who were a couple of years ago, really focused on making sure we caption everything.

Um, I took to the opportunity when I do mentor time, and most of these slides are from the half hour professional development topic I do twice a month, um, to explore how to use My tools and the best tool was Descript because I could use it for editing and it also embeds captions. I wanted them embedded because people I work with globally told me they don’t always have the opportunity to turn on captions.

People get confused in YouTube about where to go [00:01:00] and that way I knew whatever was already done. So, this is now just the last, I would say, four to six months in, because this is a screenshot, and traditionally in the bottom of the screen I would put the footer for whatever reference I was extracting from.

And this is when Descript went from one kind of caption to All sorts of captions. They now have a range of them, and this was the default one. It’s huge, but it was like, I just got to get it done. So I did get it done. Not pretty, but it was there, and I do hear people tell me it’s useful. Then I realized I could take the time to adjust the captions, but what was bothering me was the fact that it overwrites things.

Yes, there was a lot here on this slide, but it What I was saying is this woman has a way to evaluate your biases. You can go see it later. I brought it to [00:02:00] Ann and to Office Hours to say, I really am needing to have captions in a way, and I’m thinking that I need to adjust my, my band at the bottom to make it wide enough just for the captions.

So, I’m I told Ann that I would try it out and then I came to office hours with captions and discovered that, um, with moving it around, I have a 1. 1 inch band at the bottom and Descript will let you do a single line, but sometimes it pushes you to a double line anyway. Add. a readable size. I think this was 36.

And Ann said to me, Sue, wouldn’t it be great if you could, I thought first you were saying, Ann, wouldn’t it be great if you could make the gray match each section, and I have three sections, a blue section, a green, a red section, and a green section. I know, well, I realized that when we talked. You were [00:03:00] saying make it transparent, and could you make the, the, font match what’s the font you use on screen.

Descript lets you change the size of it and it has some fonts, but this font was the closest I found to my font. Um, so this is what I now can do with Descript. I still have one troubleshooting thing. This is with a transparent background, Ann, but it still sort of puts a block around it. It’s like it’s a little darker.

And I don’t know if I’m choosing the wrong transparent and I haven’t had enough time to futz with it. But it now comes up as by itself. Anything that I need to for URLs are now above the red band. And I’m really happy with how it looks. It doesn’t look sloppy. And my, my, basically my available space is in the white.

So I don’t always have full bleed photos unless I’m doing a, a, uh, a [00:04:00] slide separator. But this is how it is, and I’m thrilled with it. I love this progression. I love the idea of just making the footer of the slide. What did you say? 1. 1 inches? 1. 1 inches. Measurement. Yep. Is that set up in your SlideMaster?

It is. Can I show you my SlideMaster? I’m so proud of it. I’d love to see it. Everything matches. Everything’s labeled except the dark red. I thought I had renamed that green, but yeah, I’m so happy with it and it makes me so restful now because I was trying to use a different one for teaching and a different one.

Now I’m like, nope, just one set. So, yeah, that’s, it’s all in there, everything’s set, and no problem with, the only thing I have to do, Descript doesn’t let you set an automatic setting for your captions, you have to choose the caption, I have to change the, um, size, I change the size from 50 down to 28, which is what I want.

[00:05:00] What most of my, this slide, um, the last slide I showed you was. It comes out looking professional and I can manage just fine. Can you talk me through, like, what do I need to do to do the embedded caption magic that you’ve done? I literally don’t know where to click. Yeah, go to the far right. And the second from the bottom choice in that panel, this is called Underlord, has all these helpful things.

And I use the classic one. It’s about two thirds of the way down below the yellow. I use classic. So, click on it so I can show you what comes up in the panel. So, you see it inserts the box, and you can adjust the size of the box. You can move it all the way down, you can make it smaller, you can make it wider.

So click on the, click on the box itself[00:06:00]

and it should, I’m trying to remember where it comes up, maybe it’s, there it is, yeah. So you see it automatically comes up in white and 50 with man rope whatever. So click on the white. Now that’s where I was choosing the transparency next to the Great. To the right of that. I chose that as transparent.

That was the lightest thing I could find. Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting then for me to think through what’s the opposite of that I have to do, because these aren’t slides, this is Excel, so I need the filled background. Right. And then it’s like, where does it fit with the webcam? Because a lot of times in the editing, I’ll go from full screen to the inset webcam and back again to keep it interesting.

Yeah. I think this webcam is set to be Whatever percent in Camtasia, like 25%. So when I do make it small, it is consistently that size. So I literally didn’t even know this was [00:07:00] all possible. This is so fascinating. You move the box over, make it wide, make it small. Yeah. Um, but then let me show you, hit the classic button.

under classic, and that’s where you get the border and the background. So background is where I then, um, yeah. But yeah, that’s your fill color, so you want to change that to black, uh, to, you want to leave that white or whatever. Oh, you’re purple. I don’t think I want to do purple. I think that would be too hard to read.

Um, I’m just noticing they have an upper in here. Oops, I didn’t mean to click on that red. Um, black? No, white. White. White on black. Just go down to the white button. Go to the color panel down below and hit the white button. This is my font color. I don’t know. Font. Black font. Okay, then go to background.

Yeah. White background. [00:08:00] With maybe a hair. Transparency?

Nope.

Yeah, you’ve got, it’s just bolded around, it’s just white around the day, the text itself, not the whole box. Active word, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, there’s, I mean, it’s fun to play with all of these. Yeah. I’m working with someone now who’s neurodivergent and I chatted with her the other day about what’s not working for her in the course, and she loves captions, but I said, do you want it where it highlights each word?

And she said, no, that would be too distracting, so. Do export at the top left. Yep. And then You hit video. I export the transcript first and then I export videos. So, but that’s just me. I like [00:09:00] to have a word doc of everything because people often want to go back and see what the actual wording was that we struggled through on their CVs or whatever.

I think Descript is still the captioning tool. It is. I don’t think there’s one that has more features and more correctness than this one out there. New tech gets invented all the time, but. If anybody here wants to try one, Descript is the starting point. They have a free trial, too. I forget how much it is after that, but I’m sure the site spells out the different levels of subscriptions.

Thank you so much, Sue. You’re welcome. It’s fun to geek out on this.

The post Add *Embedded* Captions to Recorded Presentations with Descript appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

1. Pin drop maps (made for free with Google)
2. Heat maps (made with Excel)
3. Tile grid maps (also made in Excel)
4. Overlay maps (tile grids, icon stacks, or waffles on top of traditional geographic maps)

In this video, you’ll learn about the challenges of each approach. You’ll also gain some how-to tips. Thanks, Sue!

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro: Mapping course registrants
• 0:58 Ann’s ideas from previous Office Hours session
• 1:21 Google’s “pin drop” maps
• 2:30 Excel’s heat maps
• 3:27 Excel’s binary maps (filled vs. empty)
• 3:42 Pros and cons of Excel maps
• 5:40 Pros and cons of tile grid maps
• 6:50 The “overlay” of the tile grid map on the geography map
• 7:33 World map challenges
• 8:06 Sue’s preference
• 9:20 How to make Google’s pin drop maps
• 9:55 Ann’s ideas and commentary
• 11:20 Sue’s homework assignment: Try icon stacks + an overlay
• 12:40 Sue’s final thoughts

Related YouTube Lessons about Mapping

• How to Make Maps in Excel: Heat Maps and Binary Maps
• Why Isn’t My Map Working?! 10 Excel Troubleshooting Tips

Resources Mentioned in the Video

• Jon Schwabish’s world tile grid map
• Google’s “pin drop” map
• Shelly Cheng’s “overlay” of stacked icons on a geographic map

Transcript

[00:00:00] You’re watching Dataviz On The Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel.

In this lesson, you’re going to learn about maps with Sue Griffey.

Several weeks ago, I brought to office hours some mapping I was doing. I have a short course and I wanted to map the number of registrants I’ve had.

Um, and I’ve been doing this over time, since I started the course, and I work globally, so I needed a world map. So I brought a couple examples, including a tile map that a friend of Ann’s and mine developed, Jon Schwabish, and I I was also working on what Ann had taught us about geography, the geography part of charting in Excel.

So I actually have three different things to show you and then I’ll tell you where I landed and why. So I’m going to show you the progression. Not surprisingly, when [00:01:00] I was doing this, Ann said, here are the three things you need to try. So you’ll notice as I switch each topic in the bottom right corner is a check mark of what we’re starting on.

The data set. That is really easy, 79 countries, 652 people. And two years ago for my infographic at the end of 2022, I used something that was in Google. It’s a free, it’s not just a Google map. You go to your own map settings and they give you a world map. You can look at it and I hadn’t used it then for two years until this time.

Both times, it’s only required me to upload a CSV file, which is good. Now, you can see the little white panel at the top, and I’ll show you after it’s in the next slide. I decided to start with this because I know, knew how to use it. Um, they’ve added a few more features. So, When I [00:02:00] added the CSV file, it automatically graded, as you can see in the top right, um, from dark gray where there were 56 or more to light gray.

And, uh, I discovered I could choose to, choose to show data labels, which it couldn’t do a couple years ago. So what it looks like up close, that circled five, it, you can see it, but it’s not that easy to see all the data labels. You can’t do anything more. So that was the map I started with. And then I went back to Excel to try to figure out what Excel would give me for a map, because Ann’s examples have used data labels.

State, U. S. state level maps only, as I recall. And I discovered, oh, there is a way to do a heat map in Excel world charting. I’m going to show you the examples, then I’ll show you the behind the scenes. And I discovered that it did let you put in data labels. Now, obviously, this isn’t all [00:03:00] 79 countries. So, here’s my plus minus.

It was pretty easy, similar to Google Maps, to create this map. You cannot change anything except the color for the gradient. You can’t annotate it. I can’t even change the plot size. And in fact, when I pasted this version, the previous version, in as an ex, as a Microsoft Excel object, I couldn’t even move it around very easily.

But I was also able. With, um, just a slightly revised dataset to get a binary map out of it and so I’ve tried both. And they’re both very nice for an overall look, for sure. And easy. Here’s my comments and thoughts. Things I tried and funny things I found. So Ann talks about creating the geography list, and you can go, um, tag a list of countries or states, hit the geography button, and then you get a list that looks like this one [00:04:00] that has some little symbol before each country name.

But I discovered I accidentally had, because Excel always wants you to put the labels and the data in before it’ll give you a chart, I did. And what I came up with, for some reason Canada and India came up, their counts came up with a ward in Kolkata in India. I don’t know why. So when I took that off and just made it plain data back to what it is on the bottom left, then it was fine.

So I used the plain data, I went to more map charts, that’s where you get the world map view, but you only get that one map. So you can do it with or without the geography designation, meaning if you just have a list, don’t worry about defining it as geography. This is a version I did do with Geography. So, this is one of the two I showed you, and this is the default color scheme.

Here’s the variations. It gives you these three variations only, [00:05:00] and it gives you these three color variations, or these several color variations, but you can’t mix and match. You can’t, you have to choose them, and then it defines the grades automatically. And these are the only choices you have, um, the, the top and bottom are automatically ticked.

When I tick data labels, then I got the data labels, but you can see I got them in very few countries. Not that I expect a U. S. map on PowerPoint to be able to show, I mean a world map, to be able to show everything there is, uh, in 79 countries, especially some that are very small, like in Europe. And then We talked about going back to the tile world map, and Ann wanted, um, had helped me put the numbers in.

She helped me correct the formula. We figured out how to do this. This came from John Schwabisch, who Ann was talking about a few minutes ago. And Ann helped me get the formula for the data labels. So the data [00:06:00] labels come right next to the country name, which was in there. The way John has it set up and something’s locked down because I can’t change a color if I move things.

There’s a whole formula of how, a process of how I had to paste things next door to the one I wanted to put in and then paste it again to get, to, to not get a change in color and to get the right name of the country. For my audience, they won’t be necessarily familiar with a tile map. This is, you know, if someone told you this is the world, you might see it, but without telling you, I think it’s still really awkward, even though it’s appealing to me to have every country name labeled, and for people to be able to pick out their countries easily, which we can’t do on a general world map.

So I did try and, uh, sort of an overlay of a world map, um, and tried to see if that would be better. [00:07:00] It, I couldn’t get it underneath the Excel grid, obviously, so the overlay is making things very light and I couldn’t, the one thing I wanted to do is to try to highlight around each cell where there was a country represented, make that white or somehow make it stand out so you could see in the whole map.

No matter what continent you were in, you could see a certain designation for where the countries are. But even with this, I wouldn’t use this for, uh, really much of any reason. Here are my challenges. I mentioned some of them. You can’t change the tile colors in the dark gray and the dark green. It’s really hard to read, uh, the writing in it.

No matter whether I chose, it was black, I chose white, it’s still hard to read it. There’s a stepped process I had to do to add new country data labels, so I can’t update this automatically. I could, the Excel one, I could do more quickly because it’s just a list of names and the counts that I got from [00:08:00] the pivot table.

But this is the three step process, Ann, I would have had to do. So let me show you my preference. I’m going to go over each one as it’s independent. The tile map, this is the tile map that does have numbers in it, and I was able to bold those numbers where people were represented from their country. But it’s hard to understand.

It’s a world map. It’s hard to make, and it’s hard to update. The Excel map, slightly blurry I know, but the Excel map is easy to understand that it’s a world map. It was pretty easy to make, but there weren’t many adjustments I could make, and it was limited for me. And then the Google map, where the countries are already labeled for me, and most of them will stay in, and people can probably pick themselves out pretty easily, even at the, uh, Map level.

For me, that’s the, [00:09:00] that was the one that had the most adjustments. You could change the marker, uh, color. I like the gray because it helped, um, against the green. And this is where I went. I’m probably just going to go back to this if I do a map in the infographic for the end of this year. And I’m just wanting to show you all.

This is how easy it is. You go to this place, you create a new map, and, um, I will put this link in the chat for anybody who’s interested in it, but I think I’ve exercised in all three mapping options to the extent that I could. And definitely I looked at the return on investment for how much time it would take me to do something or not.

So I’m, I am going to share the recording with Jon cause I want him to see what we’ve done with this with your help. So that’s everything. Thank you so much for sharing behind the scenes of your thought process. You [00:10:00] went through so many different types of maps. Um, this one that this tool I was not aware of, people had told me about this, but I hadn’t actually seen the screenshot of this before.

In map making terms, we call it a pin drop map, like if you’ve ever gone to a restaurant or a national park and you put the physical pin in of where you’re from. This is really nice for city level data, in particular, would be at strongpoint. I think the fact that it can do that Shading to show the amount is really promising too.

Um, I totally agree with you that kind of like the regular map with the gradients because you can’t really label all the countries or I don’t know. It’s just, it’s a lot of detail that maybe you don’t even need. I’m still a fan for you of the binary map. Just showing where people were from or not. But again, I’m an outsider to your data.

So for me, I’m like, wow, look at all these different countries that are [00:11:00] represented that Sue gets to work with all these different people. And for me, that’s, that’s so amazing. But for you, that might be like, yeah, duh. I know that that’s old news and you might need a higher level of detail. Um, the tile grid maps, they’re so promising for, I think, small Smaller geographies, but again, like the world map, like you said, what are people even looking at?

Okay, can I give you a homework assignment in all your spare time to try next? More homework? Absolutely. Um, the overlay, the overlay was so promising. I saw one, I saved it on LinkedIn, I saw this two days ago, I, uh, Shelley C., who I should be connected to, I guess, I’m not following, I don’t know her last name, uh, I guess she made this?

Yeah, at the Associated Press. This is kind of an overlay, right? This is, can you see how this is similar to what you had? It’s Electoral College Units. Not quite tiles, uh, [00:12:00] not an icon array. Stacks? Icon stacks, I think would be the technical name for this. All of us Dataviz people disagree what these are called.

Um, over top of the map. So there might, there might be some type of overlay with yours that could work. I wouldn’t rule that out. So in all your spare time, if you fiddle with the formatting there and get anything promising, let me know. I’d love to see if that could be developed further. Well, this is intriguing because it also gives you the numbers.

You know, it’s kind of like a waffle chart made in the form of the states, um, the states outline. But anyway, so I did all the work for people to know what their choices are so far. This, I will say for me, it’s got to be free. It’s got to be relatively quick. I agree the binary map does when I made it. I was like, oh, wow, that’s great.

But I’m also wanting to share at the end of [00:13:00] this year, I’ll probably write everybody from every course and just say, just want you to be able to see how many people from your country and things like that, just so people Recognize. Because there are some countries where in Africa and Asia that I’ve had a lot of folks, Nigeria and India primarily, but lots of Europeans, lots of, I’m getting many more U.

S. folks now, which I didn’t the first two years. Thank you for all your encouragement.

The post 4 Types of Maps: Pin Drops, Heat Maps, Tile Grids, and Overlays appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Creating a Customer Service Visual Framework

I present a lot and have given customer service presentations in different forms and fashions for over 15 years. I usually get compliments on my presentations, but I wanted to make sure the information I was presenting was sticking with people. I needed to refresh a customer service presentation and decided to use it as an opportunity to apply the lessons from Powerful Presentations I was learning.

I had my framework in my head, but I was skeptical that with my skill level I could create something useful and decent to look at.  I am a librarian, not a graphic designer.

Begin at the Very Beginning…..It’s a Very Good Place to Start

Despite my doubts, I began.  Focusing on my outline, I had 5 areas I wanted to touch on.  I matched icons to each and then thought about what I could construct to bring them all together.  I realized that the Center Humanity portion was a target with four sections.  So that is where I started. 

Be Literal

I decided to be very literal and created a circle and wrote center humanity and put it in the center of the target icon.

This was the central point I wanted people listening me to take away.  That each person they interact with is another human being and we should remember that first and foremost in every customer service interaction.

Combine the Elements

I then put one section near each of the quadrants on the target and added the wording below.  I gave each its own color so that in my slide deck each would have a separate color to help tie people’s brains to that section. 

At this point, I had done nothing too hard, downloaded a few icons, recolored them, and added wording.  I could have stopped here and I think it would have been ok.

Pause for Reflection

But I chose to get some feedback to see if I could make it better.

At this point I paused and brought it to Office Hours for suggestions. 

Shout out to all the fabulous people who shared ideas with me and helped make this visual framework more meaningful for my presentation.

Tweak for More Impact

I received lots of great ideas and my head was spinning with all the different ways I could possibly update my visual to resonate more with my audience.  I decided to start by making the target look more like a target while keeping the center humanity in the center. 

Add More Visual Cues

I wanted to make the four other sections clearer and tie things together. I took a duplicate of the target icon and recolored it and then used the crop tool to shrink it to only one quadrant.

This is what it looked like when I was finished. 

Rinse & Repeat

I then did the same for Green, Red, and Purple.

Four Quadrants

This is what it looked like when I was finished with all the quadrants. 

I was liking where it was going and thought this would stick in people’s heads better than the original. 

Keep Centering Humanity

I was hooked on keeping the circle and plopped it on top of all the different graphics I had just created. 

This would be an easy graphic to chunk and use in my slide decks and I felt like I was on the right track.

Adding Icons

I changed some of the icons after thinking through what I was trying to convey and added them by each section. 

I was getting closer, but it still didn’t feel finished to me.

Librarians Love Words

I thought I could get away with leaving the words off and just having the icons, but it looked too bare to me.  I used Word Art and after a bunch of trial and error got the words to curve at the right angle. 

It now felt complete. 

I used the Group tool to group all of the separate graphics together and saved it as an Image.

Success!

And while I thought it was pretty great, I didn’t know if it would be helpful for attendees.  But it was! 

In the feedback, one attendee wrote that they printed off the framework and put it on their desk as a reminder to them to follow the 5 steps. 

That made my day and solidified for me why having a visual framework is so helpful.  We don’t want to just give people presentations, we want what we share to stay with people and be useful. 

The post Unlocking Creativity: Simple Steps for Non-Designers to Build Powerful Visual Frameworks appeared first on Depict Data Studio.