Looking at charts and data all day can get boring—both for you and the person you work with. While I love data, making charts, and analyzing trends, I sometimes find myself in a rut, and it is sometimes difficult to find, communicate, and display a client’s remarkable progress.
I create charts and data visualizations that are appealing and easy to follow. In behavior analysis, we often need to mix up the stimuli — the chart type, colors, layout on the page, type of analysis — to keep ourselves fresh and aware of what is happening in the data, and ultimately, in our environments.
I noticed that I progressed through one series of physical activity bar charts for one client. This progression mirrored what we targeted over time. Amy wanted to get active again, so we increased her physical activity selection, added variety, and evaluated her performance over time.
This led to four different variations of physical activity charts:
- Total Physical Activities
- Different Physical Activities
- Similar Physical Activities
- All-Time List
Total Physical Activities
This is your most basic chart. While I chose a bar graph, some might use a line graph for time-series data. Over the past couple of months, we see Amy’s activities hover between 4–7, while she was in the 2’s when we started:
You will see in the other examples below that this chart is the foundation for the remaining charts.
Different Physical Activities
Now we add activity types to the legend of the chart. These data are the manual, typed, entries in google sheets that Amy logs daily. Adding a bit of color shows the variety of activity that Amy engages in each day:
We noticed a few regular activities like the ones in black, grey, and red. These colors result from the different ways that “dog walk”, “dog walk/jog”, and “walking outside” land in our datasheet.
Sampling different activities to understand which one may produce reinforcement is a cornerstone of my coaching process.
Similar Physical Activities
Here comes the order and fun part of cleaning up the data. With all the different ways to describe physical activity types, we can create a clearer picture of chosen activities over time. When we group similar phrases, patterns begin to emerge. Amy consistently walks her dog (yellow), added treadmill time to hear program 6 weeks in (neon green), and occasionally swims (maroon) and does yoga (grey):
When you compare this chart to the previous one, we get a better picture of what Amy does each day regardless of how she typed the activity on the data sheet (e.g., “walking” vs. “walked”).
All-Time List
In the final chart, by removing the dates and flipping the data to the y-axis, we create an All-Time List.
This kind of chart helps us answer:
- What are Amy’s favorite activities?
- What are her least preferred activities?
- How does each compare to the others?
By a landslide, dog walks are her most common logged activity! Both great for her and her pups! In second place, comes treadmill time!
New Charts Highlight New Behavior
Amy’s uptick in treadmill time is fantastic to see because she and I worked on incorporating regular treadmill usage into her behavior change routine. She had the dusty thing folded up in her office and never turned it one before. I asked Amy to show me how it worked and get on it during a LIVE coaching call.
And the rest is history! This is an incredible step for her as this is new behavioral territory as she is faced with the challenge of contacting reinforcement with a brand-new behavior (walking on the treadmill).
Rethink Your Charts!
Hopefully, you have some time of record, log, or even better, a graphing tool that you use to track your health and fitness progress. When creating your charts, understand that small tweaks to them can help uncover various trends, or behavior change ideas, that may be hidden in plain sight.
Keep moving!
(NOTE: My charts above were created by collecting data in Google Sheets and graphing each in Microsoft Power BI.)
