Through employing some storytelling techniques, including choosing an appropriate chart type, strategic use of colour and size and removing confusing or complicated elements we can enhance the focus of our data story.
There are a range of benefits that data visualisation can bring to help the public sector make better decisions. However, the type of visualisation we build depends upon the audience.
Data visualisation can help unlock hidden trends through use of colour or insightful titles for example. This insight can be used to inform decision making before it is too late.
Please have a go yourself to name each chart type, then click through to see if you are right and to reveal it’s advantages and disadvantages.
Data visualisation can be useful for highlighting relationships within sub-sets of a larger dataset. This can be useful for focussing the audience onto a particular story or point.
Creating two different designs made me think about how to use colour to tailor my data visualisation to different audiences.
I recently participated in both the March and April 2018 Story Telling with Data Challenges: Basic Bar Charts and Square Area Charts respectively published by Cole Knaflic. This got me thinking about the pros and cons of both a common, simple chart type such as the basic bar chart versus a more unusual, arguably more complex chart type such as the square area chart.
Tell a story e.g. the USA is the only non-European country in the top 10 exporters for drugs and medicine.
I wanted to focus upon what proportion of the total profit per second the 25 wealthiest US companies made was due to a small number of companies such as Apple? To do this I used a Pareto Chart, which compares the cumulative percentage of profit made per second to the equivalent cumulative number of companies.
I decided to use colour more selectively to highlight the preference for personality over other characteristics.
Americans are buying more fake Christmas Trees over time, but still prefer real ones.
I had an idea to frame the topic as a question around ‘whether the World was getting hotter’?
I imagined that an elderly audience would be interested in where was on average, more or less accessible. I decided to compare the elderly population to the average level of building friendliness at the state level.
I also think it is important when highlighting social issues such as this to also add a call to action to make the reader think. I added the Water Aid logo with a link to their donation page, after consulting them for permission.
My goals…use colour in the titles and annotation to identify the brands, removing the need for a colour legend. This creates a cleaner, less cluttered visualisation.