Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Often, this discomfort seems to be driven by the belief that the audience knows better than the presenter and therefore should choose whether and how to act on the information presented. This assumption is false. If you are the one analyzing and communicating the data, you likely know it best—you are a subject matter expert.

Your audience (without other visual cues) will typically look at your visual starting at the top left and zigzagging in “z” shapes. This means they will encounter the top of your graph first. If the biggest category is the most important, think about putting that first and ordering the rest of the categories in decreasing numerical order. Or if the smallest is most important, put that at the top and order by ascending data values.

I avoid most area graphs. Humans’ eyes don’t do a great job of attributing quantitative value to two-dimensional space, which can render area graphs harder to read than some of the other types of visual displays we’ve discussed. For this reason, I typically avoid them, with one exception—when I need to visualize numbers of vastly different magnitudes. The second dimension you get using a square for this (which has both height and width, compared to a bar that has only height or width) allows this to be done in a more compact way than possible with a single dimension, as shown in Figure 2.20.

With pies, we are asking our audience to compare angles and areas. With a donut chart, we are asking our audience to compare one arc length to another arc length (for example, in Figure 2.24, the length of arc A compared to arc B). How confident do you feel in your eyes’ ability to ascribe quantitative value to an arc length?

Picture a blank page or a blank screen: every single element you add to that page or screen takes up cognitive load on the part of your audience—in other words, takes them brain power to process. Therefore, we want to take a discerning look at the visual elements that we allow into our communications. In general, identify anything that isn’t adding informative value—or isn’t adding enough informative value to make up for its presence—and remove those things.

White space can be used strategically to draw attention to the parts of the page that are not white space.

pick a single bold color to draw attention where I want it. My base color is grey, not black, to allow for greater contrast since color stands out more against grey than black.

Think of conflict and tension—between the imbalance and balance, or in terms of the problem on which you are focusing—as the storytelling tools that will help you to engage your audience. Frame your story in terms of their (your audience’s) problem so that they immediately have a stake in the solution. Nancy Duarte calls this tension “the conflict between what is and what could be.”

Another strategy is to lead with the ending. Start with the call to action: what you need your audience to know or do. Then back up into the critical pieces of the story that support it. This approach can work well if you’ve already established trust with your audience or you know they are more interested in the “so what” and less interested in how you got there.