Maximizing the Impact of Your Data: Making Better Infographics

BACKGROUND: Infographics are everywhere you look – sometimes it seems like everyone is making them. Part of this is because they are so shareable on social media, and they allow the creator to share many pieces of information at once. However, many infographics are not as effective as they could be. At the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs (AMCHP), we committed to making infographics to effectively communicate with our members and partners. To ensure that our infographics are effective, we set out to identify characteristics of successful infographics, characteristics that should be avoided, and a process to critique and improve the infographics we create. METHODS: We pulled resources from six websites with infographics best practices, design tips, and data visualization resources. We also collected numerous examples of infographics from public health and other sectors to examine their characteristics. A small group of epidemiologists, program staff, and graphic designers evaluated the tips and examples; we generated lists of characteristics and practices to avoid and design elements and data visualization to embrace when creating AMCHP infographics. The team meets monthly to help improve the content and design of AMCHP infographics. After creating these guidelines, AMHCP changed the style of the Data and Trends feature in their bi-monthly newsletter Pulse to feature an infographic rather than a traditional simple graph or chart.  RESULTS: We will share our complete lists of characteristics and practices to avoid (e.g. inappropriate or extraneous imagery, pie charts, mislabeled or unlabeled axes) and design elements and visualizations to embrace (e.g. putting the most newsworthy item at the top, telling a story, using meaningful images, ranking your data points by importance) and show examples of how these tips have resulted in better visualizations. We will demonstrate how the iterative process of improving AMCHP infographics worked for an infographic communicating the evaluation results of one of AMCHP’s programs, the Every Mother Initiative.  CONCLUSIONS: Infographics allow us to communicate multiple data points in a compelling and shareable format, but epidemiologists do not always have the skills to create effective visualizations. AMCHP’s infographics have improved following the implementation of a set of guidelines for data visualization and design.