Question: I have a client who's using a table to present several row of data. The data has one row showing how often certain activities should be performed. 

It looks something like this:

```
+---------+----------------+------------+
|  Name   |   Frequency    |    Date    |
+---------+----------------+------------+
| Value 1 | Monthly        | 2015-08-09 |
| Value 2 | Yearly         | 2015-08-09 |
| Value 3 | Monthly        | 2015-08-09 |
| Value 4 | Twice per year | 2015-08-13 |
| Value 5 | Quarterly      | 2015-08-13 |
| Value 6 | Yearly         | 2015-08-09 |
+---------+----------------+------------+

```

The value can be:

* Monthly
* Quarterly
* Twice per year
* Yearly

I'm looking for another way to show this since I don't really like using words for things like this (not really sure why, I guess I think it's ugly). One idea is to use an icon such as ![image showing a quarter](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uQJpx.png) but I think this would be hard to interpret for *monthly* for example.

Any other ideas? Or I'm just over complicating things?

Thanks!

Answer: 
I would not use icons for this purpose because they are difficult to understand without labels.

If you're worried about scannability, adding bars to ease visual comparison can help.

Here is a palette of options that use bars with different scales, and also different text representations of the frequency:

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/shobe.png)

You will have to decide whether you want to include bars or not, and how verbose you want to be with the text.
Do not use adverb but use ***every***.

* Monthly ------------→ every month
* Quarterly ----------→ every 3 months
* Twice per year ---→ every 6 months
* Yearly --------------→ every year

---

You may want to add *"once"*

> 
> *Once every 3 month*
> 
> 
>