book

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

November 2015

Beginner to intermediate

288 pages

5h 43m

English

Wiley

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Note
Bad graphs are everywhereWe aren’t naturally good at storytelling with dataWho this book is written forHow I learned to tell stories with dataHow you’ll learn to tell stories with data: 6 lessonsIllustrative examples span many industriesLessons are not tool specificHow this book is organized
Exploratory vs. explanatory analysisWho, what, and howWhoWhatHowWho, what, and how: illustrated by exampleConsulting for context: questions to askThe 3-minute story & Big IdeaStoryboardingIn closing
Simple textTablesGraphsPointsLinesBarsAreaOther types of graphsTo be avoidedIn closing
Cognitive loadClutterGestalt principles of visual perceptionLack of visual orderNon-strategic use of contrastDecluttering: step-by-stepIn closing
You see with your brainA brief lesson on memoryPreattentive attributes signal where to lookSizeColorPosition on pageIn closing
AffordancesAccessibilityAestheticsAcceptanceIn closing
Model visual #1: line graphModel visual #2: annotated line graph with forecastModel visual #3: 100% stacked barsModel visual #4: leveraging positive and negative stacked barsModel visual #5: horizontal stacked barsIn closing

The magic of storyConstructing the storyThe narrative structureThe power of repetitionTactics to help ensure that your story is clearIn closing
Lesson 1: understand the contextLesson 2: choose an appropriate displayLesson 3: eliminate clutterLesson 4: draw attention where you want your audience to focusLesson 5: think like a designerLesson 6: tell a storyIn closing
CASE STUDY 1: Color considerations with a dark backgroundCASE STUDY 2: Leveraging animation in the visuals you presentCASE STUDY 3: Logic in orderCASE STUDY 4: Strategies for avoiding the spaghetti graphCASE STUDY 5: Alternatives to piesIn closing
Where to go from hereBuilding storytelling with data competency in your team or organizationRecap: a quick look at all we’ve learnedIn closing

Content preview from Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

chapter 3 clutter is your enemy!

Picture a blank page or a blank screen: every single element you add to that page or screen takes up cognitive load on the part of your audience—in other words, takes them brain power to process. Therefore, we want to take a discerning look at the visual elements that we allow into our communications. In general, identify anything that isn’t adding informative value—or isn’t adding enough informative value to make up for its presence—and remove those things. Identifying and eliminating such clutter is the focus of this chapter.

Cognitive load

You have felt the burden of cognitive load before. Perhaps you were sitting in a conference room as the person leading the meeting was flipping through their projected slides and they paused on one that looked overwhelmingly busy and complicated. Yikes, did you say “ugh” out loud, or was that just in your head? Or maybe you were reading through a report or the newspaper, and a graph caught your eye just long enough for you to think, “this looks interesting but I have no idea what I’m meant to get out of it”—and rather than spend more time to decipher it, you turned the page.

In both of these instances, what you’ve experienced is excessive or extraneous cognitive load.

We experience cognitive load anytime we take in information. Cognitive load can be thought of as the mental effort that’s required to learn new information. When we ask a computer to do work, we are relying on the computer’s processing power. ...