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What finally made a chart for a skeptical audience click for me

This started as a messy question about a chart for a skeptical audience. The follow-up made the answer practical.

Data & Analyticsgemini-2.5-pro#charts #communication #data #data-visualization

Max Ford

Help me choose and annotate a chart so the claim and uncertainty are both visible.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Geminigemini-2.5-pro

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For a chart for a skeptical audience, I would start with these checks:

Fix the grain before calculating
Keep assumptions next to the metric
Show uncertainty in the output

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Max Ford

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Miles Kim@mileskim·3mo ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Amara Sato@amarasato·3mo ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
Useful distinction between having information and being able to apply it.