Each section has a recap of a step, practice with Cole, practice on your own, and practice at work. The structure of the practice guide closely follows the structure of the original book. To supplement Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals, Kanflic wrote a companion volume, Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice! (2019), a guide for practicing data visualization. These chapters reinforce the six-step process and the concepts introduced throughout the book.
STORYTELLING WITH DATA BY COLE NUSSBAUMER KNAFLIC SERIES
These include a series of case studies and summary of lessons learned. Knaflic ties all the steps and lessons-learned in the final chapters. The techniques vary depending on whether the story is delivered as an oral or written presentation. After summarizing lessons from storytelling and the written word, she moves on to constructing your graphics to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Knaflic starts with a discussion of the “magic” of storytelling, first in plays and then in the cinema.
She notes that “Studies have shown that more aesthetic designs are not only perceived as easier to use, but also more readily accepted and used over time …” Anyone can create aesthetically pleasing designs with a basic understanding of design principles. Finally, aesthetics refers to the appearance of the chart. Accessibility ensures that displays can be understood “by people of diverse abilities.” Knaflic stresses the importance of annotation for explaining key trends in your charts.
Affordances highlight the important information, eliminate distractions, and establish a visual hierarchy of information, so the chart elements are displayed in their order of importance. Thinking like a designer involves understanding affordances, accessibility, and aesthetics. Among the graphic elements, she identifies the use of size, position on page, and color noting that color should be used sparingly and consistently. Knaflic discusses the use of preattentive attributes for both text and graphic elements. She reviews preattentive attributes for directing the audience’s attention to key elements of the graph, while also establishing a visual hierarchy. After getting rid of unneeded detail, Knaflic stresses the importance of focusing the reader’s attention. She then shows a six-step decluttering of a sample graph, which results in a dramatic improvement in the graph.įocus attention where you want it. To put this in context, she discusses Gestalt principles, alignment, white space, and contrast. Building on Tufte’s work, Knaflic observes that clutter creates a cognitive load on the chart reader, making it more difficult to understand the chart’s message. Clutter refers to “visual elements which take up space, but don’t increase understanding.” Edward Tufte popularized the concept of clutter when he introduced the concept of chartjunk in The Visual Display of Quantitative Data in 1983. Her position on pie charts, which she terms “evil” in the book, has softened over time, as she now sees an appropriate use case for showing part-to-whole relationships.Įliminate clutter. She also recommends avoiding pie charts and three-dimensional graphs of any type. Knaflic describes and illustrates a basic set of graphics that cover most situations. Choosing an appropriate display involves selecting an appropriate graphic to display the data. These clarify the goals of the project and focus the design process.Ĭhoosing an appropriate visual display. She introduces the idea of a 3-minute story “to boil down the “so-what” down to a paragraph and the Big Idea which further narrows this down to one sentence. This requires knowing the audience (who) the definition of your goal and the mode of communication (what) and your plan using the data to support your design (how). Knaflic notes the counterintuitive nature of establishing context … it doesn’t involve data visualization! Rather, the intent is understanding the environment of the design. The book takes the reader through six steps for creating a compelling story using data. That’s where it takes you – the analyst or communicator of the information – to bring that story visually and contextually to life. But your tools don’t know what that story is. Her intended audience is “everyone who needs to communicate something to someone using data.” In explaining her motivation, she says… Knaflic’s software-agnostic book will benefit all readers. The book is a clear guide to chart design, helping readers move quickly from basic graphs to engaging and informative displays. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals (2015) by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is the current #1 Bestseller in Information Management on Amazon for good reason.
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