Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

use it to label, introduce, explain, reinforce, highlight, recommend, and tell a story.

every chart needs a title and every axis needs a title

If there is a conclusion you want your audience to reach, state it in words. Leverage preattentive attributes to make those important words stand out.

use this space for an action title.

Studies have shown that more aesthetic designs are not only perceived as easier to use, but also more readily accepted and used over time, promote creative thinking and problem solving, and foster positive relationships, making people more tolerant of problems with designs.

The use of color should always be an intentional decision;

Preserve margins; don’t stretch your graphics to fill the space,

think about what we want to highlight to our audience and only use color there.

Sometimes simply giving people transparency into why things will look different going forward can help them feel more comfortable.

showing the before-and-after and explaining why you want to shift the way you’re looking at things.

consider creating several options and getting feedback from colleagues or your audience

Identify influential members of your audience and talk to them one-on-one in an effort to gain acceptance of your design.

highlight the important stuff, eliminate distractions, and create a visual hierarchy of information.

We can leverage visual cues to draw a distinction between the actual and forecast data, easing the interpretation of the information.

On the left-hand side, the graph title, legend, y-axis title, and footnote are all aligned, creating a clean line on the left side of the visual.

“If you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve only done so on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone”

Stories unite an idea with an emotion, arousing the audience’s attention and energy.

Keep it simple. Edit ruthlessly. Be authentic. Don’t communicate for yourself—communicate for your audience. The story is not for you; the story is for them.

conflict and dramatic tension are critical components of a story.

The following are some ideas for content that might make sense to include as you build out your story and convince your audience to buy in:

End with a call to action: make it totally clear to your audience what you want them to do with the new understanding or knowledge that you’ve imparted to them.

Nirvana in communicating with data is reached when the effective visuals are combined with

One important basic point here is that your story must have an order to it.

You have to have a solid understanding of what you want to communicate before you craft the communication.

we identify a problem, we gather data to better understand the situation, we analyze the data (look at it one way, look at it another way, tie in other things to see if they had an impact, etc.), we emerge with a finding or solution, and based on this we have a recommended action.

This approach can work well if you need to establish credibility with your audience, or if you know they care about the process.

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.

“If people can easily recall, repeat, and transfer your message, you did a great job conveying it.”

The idea is that you should first tell your audience what you’re going to tell them (“Bing,” the introduction paragraph in your essay). Then you tell it to them (“Bang,” the actual essay content). Then you summarize what you just told them (“Bongo,” the conclusion).

The idea behind horizontal logic is that you can read just the slide title of each slide throughout your deck and, together, these snippets tell the overarching story you want to communicate. It is important to have action titles

Vertical logic means that all information on a given slide is self-reinforcing. The content reinforces the title and vice versa. The words reinforce the visual and vice versa

Ask them to tell you what they pay attention to, what they think is important, and where they have questions.

As we become subject matter experts in our space, it becomes impossible for us to take a step back and look at what we’ve created (whether a single graph or a full presentation) through our audience’s eyes.

The main character in every story we tell should be the same: our audience. It is by making our audience the protagonist that we can ensure the story is about them, not about us.

Changing components of a graph in Excel

Form follows function: we chose a visual display (form) that will allow our audience to do what we need them to do (function) with ease.

use simpler text in the graph title and capitalize only the first word to make it easier to comprehend and quicker to read.

add axis titles to both the vertical and horizontal axes.

upper-left-most align the graph title.

Align the y-axis title vertically with the uppermost label and the x-axis title horizontally with the leftmost label.

drawing our audience’s attention to the specific part of the story we want to focus on—either by only showing the relevant points or by pushing other things to the background and emphasizing only the relevant pieces and pairing this with a thoughtful narrative

building a robust understanding of the context.

chose an appropriate visual display.

used preattentive attributes to draw our audience’s attention to where ...

adding text to make our visual accessible and employing alignment to i...

crafted a compelling narrative and ...

I don’t typically recommend anything other than a white background.

Light elements on a dark background can create a stronger contrast but are generally harder to read.

With a white background, the further a color is from white, the more it will stand out

the version that gets circulated to your audience—as a pre-read or takeaway, or for those who weren’t able to attend the meeting—needs to be able to stand on its own without you, the presenter, there to walk the audience through it.