Upcoming: tcplot Online Feedback Session
Wednesday, Sep 30 ยท 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM CDT
Online, on Google Meet. The link goes out to everyone who RSVPs on Meetup shortly before we start.
Bring a chart. Leave with a room full of careful readers on it.
A structured feedback hour for charts in progress: a work dashboard, a personal project, or something you sketched that afternoon. No advance submission; just show up and share your screen.
The structure exists to get you the rarest kind of feedback: not whether people like your chart, but what it actually communicates.
Florence Nightingale's rose diagram (1858): blue wedges for preventable disease, red for wounds, black for everything else. She reached this design through rounds of feedback, revising until ministers and generals could not misread it.
Nightingale, F. (1858). Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East. In Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. London: Harrison and Sons. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
How the feedback works
Each chart gets twelve timeboxed minutes, in five steps:
- ▸ Set the frame (1 minute). The presenter names the audience and the one question they want answered.
- ▸ Silent looking (1 minute).
- ▸ What do you see? (4 minutes). Readers say what they read first, what the message seemed to be, and where they got lost. No suggestions yet.
- ▸ What would you change? (4 minutes). Suggestions, aimed at the presenter's question first. Specific beats sweeping.
- ▸ Presenter gets the last word (1 minute). What they're taking, and what they're setting aside.
What to bring
A chart you can share on screen, at any stage: polished, half-built, or paper held up to the camera.
No chart? Come anyway; feedback needs readers.
Who this is for
Anyone making charts, in any tool, at any level; the protocol gives a first chart and a fiftieth the same quality of reading.
RSVP on Meetup to get the link.
Hope to see you there!