Design a time-series display

CTE-1 Order: #1 Design the Visual Story Has Dependencies

Updated 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Guidance

Default to a line graph for continuous change through time; use bars for period-to-period comparison, a dot plot (never connected by a line) for irregularly-spaced samples, box plots to show a distribution shifting over time, and radar/cycle plots or heatmaps for cyclical/high-volume data. Smooth volatility with a running average rather than a single trend line, use a log scale or % change when comparing growth rates of very different magnitude, and never render a missing value as zero — break the line instead.

Details

Order:: #1
Phase:
Successor:: CTE-2 Design a part-to-whole/ranking display
Created:: Sep 18, 2026
Last Updated:: Sep 18, 2026

Workflow

Choose Chart per Analysis Type

Apply a chart-selection rule set for each of the six recurring analysis types so every finding gets the display type …

View Workflow

Assigned Agent

EDA Practitioner

The person or AI system running this playbook end to end — analyst, programmer, and …

Required Skills

Chart-Type Selection per Analysis Type Chart Design

Rules

Log scale or % change for comparing growth rates log-scale-or-change-for-comparing-growth-rates
Running averages over single trend lines for time series running-averages-over-single-trend-lines-for-time-series

Input Artifacts

No input artifacts

Output Artifacts

No output artifacts