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December 8 - December 13, 2020
Stories resonate and stick with us in ways that data alone cannot.
A story has a clear beginning, middle, and end;
important distinction to draw, between exploratory and explanatory analysis.
the information your audience needs to know.
First, To whom are you communicating?
Second, What do you want your audience to know or do?
third: How can you use data to help make your point?
The more you know about your audience, the better positioned you’ll be to understand how to resonate with them and form a communication that will meet their needs and yours.
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.
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. We’ll
The call to action would be different for the different groups.
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 would a successful outcome look like? If you only had a limited amount of time or a single sentence to tell your audience what they need to know, what would you say?
It must articulate your unique point of view; It must convey what’s at stake; and It must be a complete sentence.
Understanding and employing concepts like the 3-minute story, the Big Idea, and storyboarding will enable you to clearly and succinctly tell your story and identify the desired flow.
While tables interact with our verbal system, graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information.
The types of graphs I frequently use fall into four categories: points, lines, bars, and area.
Line graphs are most commonly used to plot continuous data.
Slopegraphs can take a bit of patience to set up because they often aren’t one of the standard graphs included in graphing applications. An Excel template with an example slopegraph and instructions for customized use can be downloaded here: storytellingwithdata.com/slopegraph-template.
The data labels that were originally outside of the bars were pulled inside to reduce clutter.
you need your audience to know? Then choose a visual display that will enable you to make this clear.
As designers of information, we want to be smart about how we use our audience’s brain power.
We’ll discuss six principles here: proximity, similarity, enclosure, closure, continuity, and connection.
stripping away unnecessary elements allows our data to stand out more.
Remember, we want to try to identify anything that will feel like effort to our audience and take that work upon ourselves as the designers of the information.
clutter has brought us a long way in terms of reducing cognitive load and improving accessibility.
Any time you put information in front of your audience, you are creating cognitive load and asking them to use their brain power to process that information.
By understanding how our audience sees and processes information, we put ourselves in a better position to be able to communicate effectively.
Figure 4.1 A simplified picture of how you see
Within the brain, there are three types of memory that are important to understand as we design visual communications: iconic memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
As we’ve discussed previously, to the extent possible, we want to limit this sort of cognitive burden on our audience.
We don’t want to make our audience work to get at the information, because in doing so, we run the risk of losing their attention. With that, we lose our ability to communicate.
This is remarkable. And profoundly powerful. It means that, if we use preattentive attributes strategically, they can help us enable our audience to see what we want them to see before they even know they’re seeing it!
Figure 4.4 shows the various preattentive attributes.
Studies have shown that we have about 3–8 seconds with our audience, during which time they decide whether to continue to look at what we’ve put in front of them or direct their
attention to something else. If we’ve used our preattentive attributes wisely, even if we only get that initial 3–8 seconds, we’ve given our audience the gist of what we want to say.
Note how, without other visual cues, you are left to process all of the information. With no clues about what’s important or should be paid attention
When it comes to explanatory analysis and leveraging this visual to share information with your audience (rather than just showing data),
Aim to work within the way your audience takes in information, not against it.
Without other cues, our audience is left to process all of the information we put in front of them. Ease this by leveraging preattentive attributes like size, color, and position on page to signal what’s important.
Evaluate the effectiveness of preattentive attributes in your visual by applying the “where are your eyes drawn?” test.
of objects having “affordances.” These are aspects inherent to the design that make it obvious how the product is to be used. For example,
