One of my favorite blogs is Junk Charts. The reason I like it (and Tufte's books and other chart/visual design resources) is that graphics are such a critical and often overlooked component of making a compelling argument. While complicated graphics can obfuscate meaning, a total lack of charts makes deciphering meaning from textual data significantly more difficult. Your chart should convey all the data necessary for communicating your message. No more. No less. Since message clarity and communicating meaning/importance are also fundamental to designing experiences, chart design principles also apply to aspects of experience design. As with charts, good experiences depend on message clarity.
In this department, Facebook's Self-Serve Ad graphics fall short of delivering a compelling argument. While I've snapped the images I'm referring to, you can go to
Facebook Advertising and click on "Case Studies" to see them in all their glory. A couple of things here:
- Average Circles (Reach Your Audience graphic)- The first graphic starts out fine. Sort of boring, but it's effective. Its basic message is that Facebook ads can improve your targeting to specific audiences. I don't necessarily need a "circles drawn to scale"-quality graphic here and while the last ring isn't labeled, I'm fine to assume it's the general FB population. So far so good.
- Scale-less (Easy and Cost-Effective graphic) - Yikes, here's where we run into problems. This next graphic is missing a very important thing: scale. Unlike in the first image, in this case it's actually really important. While the chart helpfully shows "Before Facebook" and "After Facebook" it fails to specify what it's comparing. Same store sales? Conversion rate? The article mentions 50% and 10% increases in each of these respectively. But then this chart looks like neither. It looks more like 20%. Without a scale there's no way to know.
- Scale-ful (Pages and Ads graphic) - Perhaps as a way to compensate for their previous scale-less chart, this one has a very prominent scale. But not really in a good way. As if inspired by This is Spinal Tap, this scale goes all the way to 100%. Only it doesn't need to. It could really be more impactful if it were tightened down a little. Make the scale max out at, say 30% or 40%. That would really illustrate the improvement and also reduce a lot of the empty chart space.
Now I'm not a professional chart designer (or graphic designer for that matter) and I'm not intentionally picking on Facebook, but it was very surprising to me to see a company like Facebook make two very noticeable graphical mistakes in the information surrounding one of their most innovative features - self-serve ads. I guess I'm just expecting more polish from a big web name like Facebook.
