Data visualizations are great at highlighting trends and data points, but they need a narrative to give them context and inspire action. Together, they are a powerful tool for communicating insights and accelerating the decision-making process for stakeholders.
A strong narrative makes your insights human, memorable, and easy to understand for any audience. Here are some tips for creating effective data stories:
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1. Visualize Your Data
One of the best ways to prepare yourself to effectively tell your data story is to learn the basics of data visualization. Become familiar with the different types of visualizations and understand the difference between exploratory and explanatory visuals.
Keep your audience in mind when creating your visuals and deciding what type of data you need to show. Avoid including information that doesn’t reinforce or support the point you are trying to make with your data.
When it comes to data visualization, form always follows function. Consider what you are trying to accomplish with your chart, such as illustrating exact values or comparisons, and let that inform what type of visual you choose to create. In addition, minimize the amount of text that is displayed on your chart. Too much can confuse or overwhelm, and cause people to misinterpret your data. As a result, viewers may not see trends or draw the right conclusions from your data.
2. Use Call-Outs
The modern professional world values those who are skilled at both creative storytelling and technical analysis. But even the most skilled analysts can miss the mark if they don’t take the time to make their data stories as clear and digestible as possible.
Using visual representations to explain key insights helps ensure that your audience understands and remembers the information you’re sharing. This can include charts, graphs, diagrams, spreadsheets, and maps. Often, these visualizations highlight patterns and outliers that would be difficult to spot in raw data.
The best business intelligence tools offer both data visualization and data storytelling, allowing you to create a full narrative that brings your insights to life. For example, Microsoft Power BI is an all-in-one analytics platform that allows you to build interactive visualizations and dashboards and also create a powerful narrative with customizable graphics and interactive data. Other solutions like Juicebox provide a more data journalism-style approach to creating stories with your visualizations, offering features that can help you deliver more “Aha!” moments.
3. Make Your Data Easy to Understand
In order to effectively communicate insights through your data, you need to present it in a way that is easy to understand. For example, if your visualization is too complex to comprehend, you will lose the audience’s attention and could potentially confuse them.
To make your data easily understandable, use exploratory and explanatory visuals. Exploratory visuals are used when you need to answer the what, when, why, and how questions. These are typically geared toward answering the original question you began with in your analysis. Explanatory visuals are used to deliver specific aspects of your data story or the entire data story to your audience.
A great way to help your audience understand your data is to use comparisons in the form of charts and graphs. This will allow your audience to quickly see patterns and identify the most important information within the report. For example, Home Care Toronto uses a comparison of their sales revenue and the previous year’s on their homepage to convey important information in an engaging way.
4. Make Your Visualizations Interactive
The ability to communicate insights is key for any business or organization. However, if those insights aren’t understandable and compelling, they will have little impact on the audience and won’t drive change or action. Data storytelling helps to bridge the gap between obtaining and interpreting insights.
To improve your data storytelling skills, focus on the context and needs of your audience and what you want them to accomplish with your visualizations. Become familiar with the different types of visuals and learn when one type may be more appropriate than another.
There are dozens of tools and applications available to create data visualizations. While many of them have a similar interface and functionality, some stand out above the rest. For example, Qlik Sense provides a powerful analytics platform that focuses on enabling data storytelling through interactive visualizations. The platform allows users to filter, sort and visualize their data in ways that bring meaning and clarity to the story being told.
