More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter down to the most important bits.
Her messages of “don’t be a data fashion victim” (i.e., lose the fancy clipart, graphics and fonts—focus on the message) and “simple beats sexy” (i.e., the point is to clearly tell a story, not to make a pretty chart) were powerful guides.
A recruiter told me that, today, having “proficiency in Microsoft Office” on a resume isn’t enough: a basic level of knowledge here is assumed and it’s what you can do above and beyond that will set you apart from others. Being able to effectively tell stories with data is one area that will give you that edge and position you for success in nearly any role.
There is a story in your data. But your tools don’t know what that story is. That’s where it takes you—the analyst or communicator of the information—to bring that story visually and contextually to life.
FIGURE 0.3 Example 1 (after): storytelling with data
An effective data visualization can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study, raising money for your nonprofit, presenting to your board, or simply getting your point across to your audience.
Those hired into analytical roles typically have quantitative backgrounds that suit them well for the other steps (finding the data, pulling it together, analyzing it, building models), but not necessarily any formal training in design to help them when it comes to the communication of the analysis—which, by the way, is typically the only part of the analytical process that your audience ever sees.
I quickly learned that spending time on the aesthetic piece—something my colleagues didn’t typically do—meant my work garnered more attention from my boss and my boss’s boss. For me, that was the beginning of seeing value in spending time on the visual communication of data.
I will give you practical guidance that you can begin using immediately to better communicate visually with data. We’ll cover content to help you learn and be comfortable employing six key lessons: Understand the context Choose an appropriate visual display Eliminate clutter Focus attention where you want it Think like a designer Tell a story
There are a vast number of tools that can be leveraged to tell effective stories with data. No matter how great the tool, however, it will never know your data and your story like you do. Take the time to learn your tool well so that it does not become a limiting factor when it comes to applying the lessons we’ll cover throughout this book.
While I will not focus the discussion on specific tools, the examples in this book were created using Microsoft Excel. For those interested in a closer look at how similar visuals can be built in Excel, please visit my blog at storytellingwithdata.com, where you can download the Excel files that accompany my posts.
Before you start down the path of data visualization, there are a couple of questions that you should be able to concisely answer: Who is your audience? What do you need them to know or do?
visuals to be avoided, including pie and donut charts, and discuss reasons for avoiding 3D.
clutter is your enemy!
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. That means we should take a discerning eye to the elements we allow on our page or screen and work to identify those things that are taking up brain power unnecessarily and remove them.
focus your audience’s attention
think like a designer
When it comes to the form and function of our data visualizations, we first want to think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease.
Stories resonate and stick with us in ways that data alone cannot.
A story has a clear beginning, middle, and end; we discuss how this framework applies to and can be used when constructing business presentations. We cover strategies for effective storytelling, including the power of repetition, narrative flow, considerations with spoken and written narratives, and various tactics to ensure that our story comes across clearly in our communications.
Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.
(test 100 different hypotheses or look at the data in 100 different ways) to find perhaps two pearls. When we’re at the point of communicating our analysis to our audience, we really want to be in the explanatory space, meaning you have a specific thing you want to explain, a specific story you want to tell—probably about those two pearls.
Too often, people err and think it’s OK to show exploratory analysis (simply present the data, all 100 oysters) when they should be showing explanatory (taking the time to turn the data into information that can be consumed by an audience: the two pearls). It is an understandable mistake. After undertaking an entire analysis, it can be tempting to want to show your audience everything, as evidence of all of the work you did and the robustness of the analysis. Resist this urge. You are making your audience reopen all of the oysters! Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs
...more
Recommended reading For those interested in learning more about exploratory analysis, check out Nathan Yau’s book, Data Points. Yau focuses on data visualization as a medium, rather than a tool, and spends a good portion of the book discussing the data itself and strategies for exploring and analyzing it.
First, To whom are you communicating? It is important to have a good understanding of who your audience is and how they perceive you. This can help you to identify common ground that will help you ensure they hear your message. Second, What do you want your audience to know or do? You should be clear how you want your audience to act and take into account how you will communicate to them and the overall tone that you want to set for your communication. It’s only after you can concisely answer these first two
The more specific you can be about who your audience is, the better position you will be in for successful communication.
Identifying the decision maker is one way of narrowing your audience.
It’s also helpful to think about the relationship that you have with your audience and how you expect that they will perceive you. Will you be encountering each other for the first time through this communication, or do you have an established relationship? Do they already trust you as an expert, or do you need to work to establish credibility? These are important considerations when it comes to determining how to structure your communication and whether and when to use data, and may impact the order and flow of the overall story you aim to tell.
What do you need your audience to know or do? This is the point where you think through how to make what you communicate relevant for your audience and form a clear understanding of why they should care about what you say. You should always want your audience to know or do something. If you can’t concisely articulate that, you should revisit whether you need to communicate in the first place.
If you are the one analyzing and communicating the data, you likely know it best—you are a subject matter expert. This puts you in a unique position to interpret the data and help lead people to understanding and action. In general, those communicating with data need to take a more confident stance when it comes to making specific observations and recommendations based on their analysis. This will feel outside of your comfort zone if you haven’t been routinely doing it. Start doing it now—it will get easier with time. And know that even if you highlight or recommend the wrong thing, it prompts
...more
When it really isn’t appropriate to recommend an action explicitly, encourage discussion toward one. Suggesting possible next steps can be a great way to get the conversation going because it gives your audience something to react to rather than starting with a blank slate.
If you simply present data, it’s easy for your audience to say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and move on to the next thing. But if you ask for action, your audience has to make a decision whether to comply or not. This elicits a more productive reaction from your audience, which can lead to a more productive conversation—one that ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
For live presentations, practice makes perfect Do not use your slides as your teleprompter! If you find yourself reading each slide out loud during a presentation, you are using them as one. This creates a painful audience experience. You have to know your content to give a good presentation and this means practice, practice, and more practice! Keep your slides sparse, and only put things on them that help reinforce what you will say. Your slides can remind you of the next topic, but shouldn’t act as your speaking notes.
Here are a few tips for getting comfortable with your material as you prepare for your presentation: Write out speaking notes with the important points you want to make with each slide. Practice what you want to say out loud to yourself: this ignites a different part of the brain to help you remember your talking points. It also forces you to articulate the transitions between slides that sometimes trip up presenters. Give a mock presentation to a friend or colleague.
with a written document or email, you (the creator of the document or email) have less control. In this case, the audience is in control of how they consume the information. The level of detail that is needed here is typically higher because you aren’t there to see and respond to your audience’s cues.
At this point at the onset of the communication process, it is important to identify the primary communication vehicle you’ll be leveraging: live presentation, written document, or something else. Considerations on how much control you’ll have over how your audience consumes the information and the level of detail needed will become very important once you start to generate content.
What tone do you want your communication to set? Another important consideration is the tone you want your communication to convey to your audience. Are you celebrating a success? Trying to light a fire to drive action? Is the topic lighthearted or serious? The tone you desire for your communication will have implications on the design choices
Finally—and only after we can clearly articulate who our audience is and what we need them to know or do—we can turn to the data and ask the question: What data is available that will help make my point? Data becomes supporting evidence of the story you will build and tell.
Ignore the nonsupporting data? You might assume that showing only the data that backs up your point and ignoring the rest will make for a stronger case. I do not recommend this. Beyond being misleading by painting a one-sided story, this is very risky. A discerning audience will poke holes in a story that doesn’t hold up or data that shows one aspect but ignores the rest. The right amount of context and supporting and opposing data will vary depending on the situation, the level of trust you have with your audience, and other factors.
Let’s recap who we have identified as our audience, what we need them to know and do, and the data that will help us make our case: Who: The budget committee that can approve funding for continuation of the summer learning program. What: The summer learning program on science was a success; please approve budget of $X to continue. How: Illustrate success with data collected through the survey conducted before and after the pilot program.
If you’re on the requesting side of the communication and asking your support team to build a communication, think about answering these questions for them up front: What background information is relevant or essential? Who is the audience or decision maker? What do we know about them? What biases does our audience have that might make them supportive of or resistant to our message? What data is available that would strengthen our case? Is our audience familiar with this data, or is it new? Where are the risks: what factors could weaken our case and do we need to proactively address them? What
...more
Knowing what the desired outcome is before you start preparing the communication is critical for structuring it well. Putting a significant constraint on the message (a short amount of time or a single sentence) can help you to boil the overall communication down to the single, most important message.
being concise is often more challenging than being verbose. Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal recognized this in his native French, with a statement that translates roughly to “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” (a sentiment often attributed to Mark Twain).
3-minute story The 3-minute story is exactly that: if you had only three minutes to tell your audience what they need to know, what would you say? This is a great way to ensure you are clear on and can articulate the story you want to tell. Being able to do this removes you from dependence on your slides or visuals for a presentation. This is useful in the situation where your boss asks you what you’re working on or if you find yourself in an elevator with one of your stakeholders and want to give her the quick rundown. Or if your half-hour on the agenda gets shortened to ten minutes, or to
...more
Big Idea The Big Idea boils the so-what down even further: to a single sentence. This is a concept that Nancy Duarte discusses in her book, Resonate (2010). She says the Big Idea has three components: It must articulate your unique point of view; It must convey what’s at stake; and It must be a complete sentence.
Let’s consider an illustrative 3-minute story and Big Idea, leveraging the summer learning program on science example that was introduced previously. 3-minute story: A group of us in the science department were brainstorming about how to resolve an ongoing issue we have with incoming fourth-graders. It seems that when kids get to their first science class, they come in with this attitude that it’s going to be difficult and they aren’t going to like it. It takes a good amount of time at the beginning of the school year to get beyond that. So we thought, what if we try to give kids exposure to
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Storyboarding is perhaps the single most important thing you can do up front to ensure the communication you craft is on point. The storyboard establishes a structure for your communication. It is a visual outline of the content you plan to create.
When it comes to storyboarding, the biggest piece of advice I have is this: don’t start with presentation software. It is too easy to go into slide-generating mode without thinking about how the pieces fit together and end up with a massive presentation deck that says nothing effectively. Additionally, as we start creating content via our computer, something happens that causes us to form an attachment to it. This attachment can be such that, even if we know what we’ve created isn’t exactly on the mark or should be changed or eliminated, we are sometimes resistant to doing so because of the
...more
Avoid this unnecessary attachment (and work!) by starting low tech. Use a whiteboard, Post-it notes, or plain paper. It’s much easier to put a line through an idea on a piece of paper or recycle a Post-it note without feeling the same sense of loss as when you cut something you’ve spent time creating with your computer. I like using Post-it notes when I storyboard because you can rearrange (and add and remove) the pieces easily to explore different narrative flows.
we storyboard our communication for the summer learning program on science, it might look something like Figure 1...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
