Effective Data Storytelling

Chapter 8 Visuals (Part 2) Polishing the Scenes of Your Data Story

This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring, flat data and bringing it to life through visualization.

—John W. Tukey, mathematician

For an upcoming data storytelling workshop at a Fortune 500 company, I was preparing some “makeover” examples to show how charts they had produced in the past could be enhanced and made more effective. This workshop was for a group of PhD scientists who supported the company’s sales and marketing teams with in-depth technical expertise and research analysis. They worked heavily with data, so I knew data literacy wouldn’t be an issue with this group. However, as I was examining one of the charts I was considering for a makeover example, I discovered it had a common flaw that occurs more regularly than I would expect.

In Figure 8.1, you can see a “before” version of the pie chart as well as the redesigned “after” version I hoped to produce—if I hadn’t discovered the defect. Before you read ahead, can you spot what’s wrong with both of these pie charts?

Figure 8.1 The original pie chart on the left suffers from many design issues. The redesigned pie chart on the right addresses many of the original chart’s issues. However, a key flaw still undermines both charts.

When you look closer at the pie charts in question, you’ll discover the slices don’t add up to 100%—only ...