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April 5 - April 19, 2020
Who is your audience? What do you need them to know or do? This chapter describes the importance of understanding the situational context, including the audience, communication mechanism, and desired tone.
cognitive load
Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.
Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.
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?
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.
Prompting action
Knowing what the desired outcome is before you start preparing the communication is critical for structuring it well.
the 3-minute story and the Big Idea.
The storyboard establishes a structure for your communication. It is a visual outline of the content you plan to create.
When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.
Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose their ears and attention to make your point verbally.
Slopegraphs can be useful when you have two time periods or points of comparison and want to quickly show relative increases and decreases or differences across various categories between the two data points.
Figure 2.20 Square area graph
information designers
For more alternatives to pie charts, check out case study 5 in Chapter 9.
Figure 2.27 Strategies for avoiding a secondary y-axis
Gestalt principles of visual perception
“there is still some space left on that page, so let’s add more data.” No! Never add data just for the sake of adding data—only add data with a thoughtful and specific purpose in mind!
preattentive attributes can be extremely useful for doing two things: (1) drawing your audience’s attention quickly to where you want them to look, and (2) creating a visual hierarchy of information.
See your graphs and slides through colorblind eyes
David McCandless created a visualization showing colors and what they mean in different cultures, which can be found in his book The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia (2012) or on his website at informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures.
we first want to think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and then create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease.
In Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell, Holden, and Butler, 2003), it is recommended that at most 10% of the visual design be highlighted.
Guidelines for using highlight tools
In his book Airman’s Odyssey, Antoine de Saint-Exupery famously said, “You know you’ve achieved perfection, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing to take away” (Saint-Exupery, 1943).
These super-categories provide a hierarchical organization that simplifies the process of taking in the information.
Thoughtful use of color, alignment, and white space are components of the design that you don’t even notice when they are done well.
It is a fact of human nature that most people experience some level of discomfort with change.
There are a few strategies you can leverage for gaining acceptance in the design of your data visualization:
What exactly is story? At a fundamental level, a story expresses how and why life changes.
outlined the following tips, which I’ve excerpted from his short article, “How to Write with Style”
In his book, Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson outlines the following questions to consider and address when it comes to setting up the story:
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.”
You retain your audience’s attention through this part of the story by addressing how they can solve the problem you introduced.
Nirvana in communicating with data is reached when the effective visuals are combined with a powerful narrative.
The answers to these questions will help you to determine what sort of narrative flow will work best, given your specific situation.
The narrative flow is the spoken and written path along which you take your audience over the course of your presentation or communication.
As part of making the narrative flow clear, we should consider what pieces of the story will be written and what will be conveyed through spoken words.
By telling your audience how you are going to structure your presentation, it can make both you and them more comfortable.
Repeatable sound bites
Bing, Bang, Bongo is one strategy to leverage to help ensure that your story is clear.
four tactics to help ensure that your story is clear in your presentation: horizontal logic, vertical logic, reverse storyboarding, and a fresh perspective.
Ask them to tell you what they pay attention to, what they think is important, and where they have questions.
Stories are magical.
Read the closing part for a quick chapter summary
consider specifically the who, what, and how,
forcing the audience’s attention to be exactly where I want it as I am speaking.
with the following example
If we want to tell all three stories, however, I’d recommend a slightly different approach.
There are a few strategies for taking the would-be-spaghetti graph and creating more visual sense of the data.
This allows the audience to easily compare both the negative segments at the left and the positive segments at the right across the two bars and, because of this, is a useful way to visualize survey data in general.
Data visualization—and communicating with data in general—sits at the intersection of science and art.
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