Creating Infographics - Thing 21

I haven't really seen too many Infographics knocking about the place but I think they definitely have their place in presenting information and/or statistics in easy to digest bite-sized chunks. I've always thought that it must be quite fiddly to produce one but I didn't realise that there were tools to help you. Should have known!

For those of you who read Thing 17, you will know that I am chairing or sitting on a number of Task and Finish groups this year. There is always a report to produce and these tend to follow the same format. A survey is carried out in order to get the opinion of the customers, we look at the statistical information available from the library management system, and generate some recommendations. I will have at least 3 such reports to produce over the course of the year.

The surveys are always carried out in Questback so I would let it do it's thing and produce the survey information in it's usual set-up of tables, charts and graphs. It works quite well and I don't have to fiddle with the raw data.

The statistical information from the LMS has the option of Excel and I wonder whether an infographic would work well here. Similarly, not everyone has the time to read a lengthy report so perhaps an infographic could work in terms of presenting the recommendations.  Anything that can cut down a wordy report can only be helpful to the people having to read it in the first place.

I think that an Infographic could work extremely well when presenting these recommendations and actions back to the customer base. A new way of presenting 'You said, We did'. The example below by City University Library demonstrates exactly how it could be used.

City University Library: You Said, We Did
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/504895808198553010/

Easy to display, easy for people to read and (hopefully) easy to produce. I also like the idea of word clouds mentioned on Rudai 23's pinterest board for this topic. It highlights Wordle. A colleague used word clouds as a way of pulling together the information from 'the any other comments' question that always appears at the end of surveys. Sometimes this is the question that provides the most insight about the customer and what they think about your service overall. I think working through anecdotal comments like these would be time consuming but rewarding for the reader of the report. As my next batch of reports are due around Easter of next year, I have giving myself plenty of time to experiment with the tools highlighted here.