We all love a good visual. Whether it's an infographic, video clip, or image a well done visual can not only captivate and entertain your audience, but also engage and educate them. Today, I wanted to specifically talk about interactive visualizations. Interactive visualizations are a great way to tailor specific information to your end users. They enable readers to focus on interesting parts and details, to customize the content, explore large amounts of data.

So if interactive visualizations are so awesome, what are some good tips to help you design them? Well, you're in luck. We offer up four tips to assist you in creating some interactive visualizations so cool that your audience might not realize that they're actually learning something.

1.On-Demand Highlighting & Details

Having the ability to highlight data or specific details that you want to point out on-demand is a useful feature in almost all data visualizations. Sometimes it's difficult to pick and choose "only the best" data for a visualization. Sometimes, there is just too much interesting data. This is where having the ability of on-demand data highlighting or details is so important. By using this strategy, you're able to shy away from creating an overwhelming visualization while still conveying tons of important information to your viewer.

2.User-driven Content Selection

According to Grammel, "A major advantage of interactive visualizations is that the content can be changed by the user." Instead of focusing on how data will be displayed, the focus shifts on designing the template through which the various data sets are displayed. Users should select the household type by choosing a primary resident and adding or removing additional residents. When users change each piece of information, the visualization is then updated accordingly giving immediate feedback.

3.Multiple Coordinated Visualizations

"A single graphical representation typically only shows a few dimensions at once and in a particular way." However, "by assembling multiple standard parts and coordinating them, you can show different aspects of the data at the same time", writes Grammel.

As an example, using multiple visuals to simultaneously portray various data at one time can be given. For instance by having both a bubble and line chart, you may allow the user to explore interesting points in time.

4.Show Data in Different Ways

One of the drawbacks of having multiple coordinated visualizations is that there is less screen space for each. If you are going to go down this route, you should allow the user to reconfigure the mappings from data to visual. Most people believe that this is a solid alternative that can help in maximizing the space available for your visualizations.

We genuinely hope that with these four tips your next interactive visualization is your best one yet. If you experienced in creating these super cool visualizations, you can make a mixture of your tips and ours.