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October 6 - December 18, 2018
The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter down to the most important bits.
Being able to visualize data and tell stories with it is key to turning it into information that can be used to drive better decision making.
There is a story in your data. But your tools don’t know what that story is.
Being able to tell stories with data is a skill that’s becoming ever more important in our world of increasing data and desire for data-driven decision making.
No matter how great the tool, however, it will never know your data and your story like you do.
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.
every single element you add to that page or screen takes up cognitive load on the part of your audience.
Stories resonate and stick with us in ways that data alone cannot.
Data visualization—and communicating with data in general—sits at the intersection of science and art.
Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.
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
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?
How can you use data to help make your point?
by trying to communicate to too many different people with disparate needs at once, you put yourself in a position where you can’t communicate to any one of them as effectively as you could if you narrowed your target audience.
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.
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.
When it really isn’t appropriate to recommend an action explicitly, encourage discussion toward one.
Consider the level of control you have over how the information is consumed as well as the amount of detail needed at either end of the spectrum.
with a live presentation, you (the presenter) are in full control.
Not all of the detail needs to be directly in the communication (the presentation or slide deck),
Keep your slides sparse, and only put things on them that help reinforce what you will say.
At the right side of the spectrum, with a written document or email, you (the creator of the document or email) have less control.
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.
sparse slides for a live presentation (since you’re there to explain anything in more detail as needed), and denser documents when the audience is left to consume on their own.
This gives rise to the slideument, a single document that’s meant to solve both of these needs.
Data becomes supporting evidence of the story you will build and tell.
A discerning audience will poke holes in a story that doesn’t hold up or data that shows one aspect but ignores the rest.
There is sometimes additional context in the head of this requester that they may assume is known or not think to say out loud.
Knowing what the desired outcome is before you start preparing the communication is critical for structuring it well.
being concise is often more challenging than being verbose.
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”
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.
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.
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.
Figure 2.1 The visuals I use most
When you have a number or two that you want to communicate, think about using the numbers themselves.
Tables interact with our verbal system, which means that we read them.
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.
with a table is that you want the design to fade into the background, letting the data take center stage.
A heatmap is a way to visualize data in tabular format, where in place of (or in addition to) the numbers, you leverage colored cells that convey the relative magnitude of the numbers.
To reduce this mental processing, we can use color saturation to provide visual cues,
Be sure when you leverage this to always include a legend to help the reader interpret the data
While tables interact with our verbal system, graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information.
Scatterplots can be useful for showing the relationship between two things, because they allow you to encode data simultaneously on a horizontal x-axis and vertical y-axis to see whether and what relationship exists.
Line graphs are most commonly used to plot continuous data. Because the points are physically connected via the line, it implies a connection between the points
Note that when you’re graphing time on the horizontal x-axis of a line graph, the data plotted must be in consistent intervals.
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.
