Visualizing Health and Healthcare Data

Chapter FiveTable Design Checklist

Fundamentals of Table Design

Tables are the most fundamental of display devices, arranging values in rows and columns in order to look up and compare specific, precise values. Ensuring that tables are well-designed and easy to use requires understanding the best practices of table design, detailed in the following checklists.

Organization/Categorization

• Simple lookups of data may be best organized alphabetically or numerically (for nominal data where there is no underlying order).
• Data that is part of an accepted/standardized taxonomy is best ordered in alignment with that system—for example, tumor classification or ICD10 hierarchy.
• Data may also be arranged to most effectively communicate the story, for example, by ranked results or areas requiring attention (e.g., not meeting goal) versus tables designed to look up and compare values such as by geographic region or medical service.
• Calculated columns are arranged logically, reflecting how they were calculated. For example: numerator (column A) divided by denominator (column B) equals percentage or rate (column C); value (column A) minus value (column B) equals difference (column C).

Non-Data Ink

• Eliminate as much non-data ink (heavy gridlines, unnecessary colors) as possible to ensure the data is the star. Gridlines have been lightened or eliminated.
• White space or light highlighting is used to differentiate rows and columns of data.
• See Figure 5.1 for an example.
• Color-coding of cells ...