Clients look to us to help them make their charts and graphs look better. That's what most folks think "data visualization" means in our world today. Though that is part of our job, it's not the whole story. While the majority of our focus may be on modifying graphs and presentations, fruitful communication with data goes beyond simply polishing up a graphic.

Think about how we interact at work. We don't just send slide decks back and forth. We work on shared spreadsheets and documents, suggesting remarks and altering them cooperatively. We attend in-person and virtual conferences, chat with our coworkers, and use specialized tools like Slack, Teams, Trello, Airtable and Mural to keep us organized. And yes: most of us still employ the good old-fashioned email.

Regardless of the format, we have to make sure our message is clear and easy to understand, and that it resonates with our audience. It's a lesson we emphasize in our public and custom workshops alike, and it's one I recently had the opportunity to explore in more detail.

Case study: performance report card

The client in question was a team within a large organization with franchised retail locations worldwide. They wanted assistance improving the effectiveness of their communications for a current performance initiative. They had been sending out a quarterly email to a subset of franchisees that was supposed to be motivational, but it was not generating the hoped-for response.

For clarity’s sake, I’ll explain the context piece by piece:

Who was the team sending the communications? The Global Franchise Support Team (GFST), a corporate-level group that helped franchisees and employees meet customer service goals, and thus help the organization maintain a positive brand image worldwide.

What were they using to generate the emails? A system called CAP that tracked franchise performance, goals, and action plans…and, crucially, can send out personalized, automated emails.
Why were these messages being sent? At the time, GFST was running an optional initiative called “Developing In-Store Confidence (DISCO)”, focused on educating team members at the store level about the company’s product lines. GFST believed that having a more knowledgeable front-line sales staff interacting with shoppers would improve overall customer satisfaction. To help franchisees stay on top of their goals, CAP would email each of them a quarterly, individualized DISCO report card.
What did GFST hope the outcome of these emails would be? The goal of the message was to motivate franchisees to stay focused on improving their customer service metrics. The email would also prompt recipients to create, maintain, and share in the CAP system their specific action plans for ensuring that DISCO targets would be met or exceeded in the following quarter.

To summarize: the corporate office (GFST) used a software program (CAP) to keep track of and send emails about every participating franchisee’s performance against specific customer service goals (DISCO).

Here’s a sample email from that system below. As you read through it, keep a couple of questions in mind:

What caught your attention at first glance?
What message or messages do you think are the most important for the recipient of this email to focus on?

Here’s the email:

(Note: details have been modified to maintain confidentiality.)

Where were your eyes drawn?

Look away from the email and then quickly look back at it. What did you notice first? Were your eyes immediately drawn to certain text, colors, or images? Different people will likely notice different things, but a few elements pop more than others:

The “celebration” graphic in the top right (bold and colorful)
The big button to “update your progress”
The actual DISCO scores (large, with visual padding surrounding them)

What were the key messages?

As I processed this email, I found several messages. Two struck me as likely to be the most important to the recipients (the franchisees):

Congratulations! Your scores are above “unacceptable thresholds”
Actual scores with variance to thresholds

Others are probably less important to the franchisees, but would matter to the sender (the GFST team):

Thank you for participating in the DISCO initiative
Here’s how to access your action plan
Here’s how to share news of your store’s success with GFST
Feedback survey

Our eyes should be drawn to the key messages

By examining the distinct messages within this email, we realized that some of the essential points, from the recipient’s point of view, were being lost while others that were not as consequential drew too much attention.

    
Message in the email (from top to bottom)
    Is it important to the recipient?
    Does it draw your attention?  
  

    Thanks for participating
    no
    YES  
  

    You're above unacceptable thresholds
    YES
    no  
  

    Here's how to access your action plan
    sort of
    sort of  
  

    Here's how to share news of your success with GFST
    sort of
    no  
  

    Your actual scores for this quarter
    YES
    YES  
  

    Take the feedback survey
    no
    no  
  

This was an “aha moment” for several people during the workshop. In crafting the email template, the GFST team hadn’t focused on what would matter most to the franchisees. Instead, the emphasis was on action items that GFST cared about, regardless of how much or how little the message recipients might value them.

(One tool you can use to think through these issues—what do we care about, vs. what does our audience care about—is the Big Idea workshee t, which challenges us to get very specific about our intended message before we build out our communication.)

Rebuild the email, with a focus on mutual interests

We started our email revisions by taking into account the needs and interests of franchisees and the corporate office alike, allowing us to identify and rank three mutually important messages:

Congratulations! Your scores are above “unacceptable thresholds”
Here are your actual scores (with variance to thresholds)
This is how you access and update your action plan

With these three messages agreed upon, we began our redesign by giving each one its own section of the email. Creating a spatial distinction among them lent a clear visual hierarchy to the communication that was easily scannable and understandable for a reader.

Redesign section 1: Congratulations!

It’s human nature to want to be recognized and appreciated for doing good work. There’s an opportunity to do that here, by beginning the communication on a positive and personal note. That was the focus of the redesign of this first portion of the communication.

We changed the "Congratulations!" message to recognize the franchise leader and their team's performance, rather than their participation in an enterprise-wide initiative. Design-wise, we removed the borders and clip art, which gave us more room to make the “congratulations” text bigger and bolder. We also used boldface sparingly—the original version was entirely bolded—to draw positive attention to the recipient personally, thus creating a good first impression.

Redesign section 2: Your scores were great!

Next came the actual scores: the reasons for the congratulations.

One of the best aspects of the original email was that the numeric scores were presented as big, bold numbers. We enhanced that in the new version, adding a number line to show how the franchise’s actual scores compared to the goals. To further emphasize the scores’ importance, we moved them “above the fold,” so that they would be visible immediately without scrolling when the email was opened.

We changed the accompanying text to say that the scores “beat the Quality Assurance thresholds for Q3 of 2022,” instead of framing it negatively (“your scores are both trending above Quality Assurance unacceptable thresholds”). For good measure, we added “Great work!”

Blue type distinguishes this section from the previous one. Readers generally assume that when items in an email (or on a page or a screen) are the same color, they are related. With this approach, we differentiate sections from one another without resorting to the use of clunky borders, background tints, horizontal rules, or other extra elements that would clutter the page or screen.

Redesign section 3: Here’s how to update your action plan

We've already shared two essential and positive messages, so our audience probably feels good by this point in the email. But now it's time to shift the focus to GFST's request: that franchisees keep their plans up-to-date on the CAP system.

It can be difficult to encourage people to complete tasks that don't appear to benefit them. That’s why we decided to put this particular section third, believing that it would be easier to motivate franchisees to take action here if they were already feeling the goodwill from the previous two sections.

Here’s what the third section looked like after the remake:

This part of the email now kicks off with a general call to action. Following up on the good news from prior sections, we immediately use that positive feeling to encourage recipients to “Keep the momentum going!” by completing a few distinct action items. (The original email lacked this direct request.)

We emphasized certain words and used a numbered list format to make the next steps easier to find and read; the original email listed them out in a paragraph. We found a more intuitive place for the “update your progress” button in this version of the email (right after the instructions on what to do). Rather than being distracting, it is easier to spot, and will likely facilitate participation by making the call-to-action easier to address immediately.

Again, notice that we used a single, distinct color for all the messaging in this section. Not coincidentally, it’s the same color as the GFST logo. This helps to subtly link the content of this part of the email to the office that is requesting these actions of the franchisee.

Add a section 4: By the way…

Our original email also included a link to a survey. It didn’t seem especially important to either GFST or the recipients, but we didn’t feel comfortable removing it entirely. Instead, we made some slight cosmetic changes to it and kept it at the very end of the email, following section 3 and all in black:

The full redesign: before and after

No single step of this makeover was a drastic change on its own. In combination, though, the modifications resulted in a clearer and more audience-focused communication. This version is likely to leave recipients with a more positive impression, and GFST with franchisees who are more amenable to both improving their performance and keeping the CAP system up to date.

Compare the version of the email we started with with the version after our changes were implemented:

It's easy to understand the satisfaction of turning a dull graph into a delightfully crafted visual, but transforming other types of communication can be just as exhilarating and satisfying.

Here, getting from “before” to “after” involved only a slight change to the framing of the messages and to the layout of the design elements. Most of the improvement came directly from considering the needs and interests of the audience, as well as the needs and interests of the sender.

Aesthetically beautiful communications can sometimes fail, just as utilitarian communications can sometimes succeed. The true “beauty” of a communications makeover isn’t in how it looks, but in how close to perfectly it achieves its intended purpose.

the true beauty of a communications makeover