Convert your data visualisation into data storytelling

Hans Rosling, the master of data storytelling, once explained that data visualization is like looking at musical notes, but you will not hear music just by looking at them. This great metaphor in a simple way differentiates data visualization from data storytelling.

When I think about how data serve us, they are only a bridge between our imagination or expectations and reality. They need a guide who reveals their shape and meaning to unlock their full potential. Everything depends on how comfortable we feel with numbers. Our main goal when we work with data shouldn’t be presenting numbers but highlighting the situation behind them, problems to address or opportunities we can leverage. Some people don’t have a natural instinct to read between data lines, while some do. Some people need a guide some don’t.

But at the beginning, I would like to dig into concerns about the differences between data visualisations and data storytelling. Many times, both terms are used interchangeably which is misleading. The biggest distinction between those two terms is that the first one focuses on displaying data in readable form, and the second is communicate insights and conclusions.

Data visualisation is simply displaying data. Our intention here is not to communicate information but to show data to receivers and give them the possibility to build their insights and conclusions. Data storytelling, on the other hand, is something totally counterparty. We, as authors, want to sell receivers one of the possible stories around a particular data set. However, that story can be more or less ethical or trustworthy, but I won’t touch that sensitive topic here – to go deeper into ethics in presenting data read this post.

Of course, like in the marketing world, we have some tips and tricks to sell our stories.

Narration

Narration is a game changer in communicating data findings. It is the heart of data storytelling. One data set can contain dozens of stories. What we pick up and how we tell about them depends on our goals. Storytelling is a very successful tool in communication or marketing. Humans crave stories from the beginning of our species. This is our natural way of passing messages mainly because it activates many parts of our brain like language processing, movement processing, and emotion processing. Due that engaged processes we can remember things easier.

Visual attributes

How we frame the story will affect how this story will be displayed. Yes, displayed. In data storytelling, we use all visual attributes to get a message across to our audience. The main part is to properly link the message with what is presented. We use colours, shapes, positions, and text to focus or guide the audience’s attention.

Let’s get through the basics of visual narration.

In the above picture, the same data set is displayed. However, with a totally different intention. On the left side, data is presented by categories (social interactions) on the timeline (age). Interpretation is on the audience’s side. The audience can craft their own stories based on their feelings, expectations, and experiences.

On the right, the data set is filtered by author lenses. The author focuses only on one of the categories – time spent alone and presents the positive aspect of the fact that when we age, we have more time for ourselves. To promote this thesis, she exposed the category “Alone” with orange colour and combined the rest of the categories into one and painted them with neutral grey colour. Due to this technique, the category “Alone” is pushed out to the foreground for paying the viewers’ attention. Furthermore, the category “Alone” is placed first from the visualization baseline, so we can see the increasing trend over time. A thoughtful title is important as well to influence how we interpret the whole visualisation.

Narration over narration

The author’s thesis presented above is positive. Can we turn it into a negative one? Let’s compare below two examples.

Again, the same data set is used. By implementing various techniques, we can play on people’s emotions to evoke different outlooks of the presented information.

On the left, the bright, optimistic colour orange is used to emphasise the advantages of the situation. However, the example on the right gives us another impression. Blue colour, often joined with sadness, bars falling as streams of rain from the sky upon someone’s head, and the pessimistic title leaves us without a doubt that being alone when you get older is nothing pleasant.

Is it manipulation? I didn’t change here data set or axis scale. I just move viewers’ focus and show another perspective. Nevertheless, I can leave the audience with counter feelings.

So, I’ll repeat here once again, it is your decision how to sell your data storytelling.

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How a daily dashboard can boost the motivation of your team.

I learnt a new concept – inner work life. Inner work life is the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (read an interview with authors) did research on 238 employees in 7 companies and studied nearly 12 000 diary entries to find out how a mix of daily mood, emotions, self-perception, and interactions with other people in an organization can influence progress at work. The results of research and strategies for managers are described in the authors’ book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work”.

Many managers try to solve the puzzle of how to boost the motivation of their subordinates. Many employees struggle with their own demotivation and lack of engagement which ruins their sense of purpose. Research shows that there are two main triggers that influence positive inner work life – progress and setbacks. Even small daily progress at work has a tremendous positive impact on our mood and motivation at work that can last for a few days, however, it is a double-edged sword. Small losses or setbacks can have negative effects. Nevertheless, except for those triggers to maintain positive inner work life, people need additional stimulants called by the authors: catalysts and nourishers. Catalysts are actions that directly support work like proper tools, help from colleagues or well-designed processes. Nourishes relate to interpersonal interactions like getting respect and recognition and being encouraged by managers or colleagues. But those stimulants don’t have a such critical influence on bad vs good mood day as an experience of progress or setbacks (more to read about research result).

Now we know the concept of inner work life in a nutshell. This concept is much more important for jobs where people have to deal with complex tasks and need to leverage their problem-solving skills or rely on their creativity. Of course, there are jobs where this idea can be hard to implement for instance in easy repeatable work, but I believe that in such cases introducing some elements of concepts can significantly impact the quality of the work and people’s well-being. However, before we can benefit from positive inner work life as an organization and individuals, we must rethink how do we understand progress and which tools we would like to use to track it.

How the power of progress can be leveraged in organizations

Establish what progress means for you and your team

Many of us see progress as something like a milestone, a tremendous change from one state to another underestimating small changes which in fact summarize into those larger ones. But exactly those small daily steps bring us closer to achieving the most ambitious goals. To run a marathon, first of all, you must put your shoes on and step out of your house. Many organizations are too focused on their goals, and they are forgetting about the road that leads to goals. But in fact, that road enables those organizations to learn and grow.

Chunk long-term KPIs into manageable pieces

Another thing to be concerned about is how goals are defined in the organization. Of course, there are annual goals, which from the bottom of the organization can be seemed as abstract and hard to achieve. To make them more tangible for employees, they should be chunked into small, manageable pieces. For instant. It’s great to have an annual sales goal of $2mln but to hit this target each employee must at least calls 10 clients per day. Those daily calls can be treated as progress.  

Plan work in daily iterations

If your organization works in weekly cycles, shifting toward finishing daily tasks will be a challenge. Especially when you must change the behaviour of planning. Planning daily tasks is more demanding because you must think deeply about what you can do and when, what should be done first, and which tasks are critical or can occur as bottlenecks. It is much easier to set weekly or monthly goals and then pray to accomplish them. Someone would say that such granularity is micromanagement. But the devil is in the details. Those tasks should be prepared by the team, not by the manager.  People should have the autonomy to plan their own work and feel responsible for the plan execution.  Otherwise, the power of progress won’t work.

Use the Kanban board to track and visualize progress daily

One of the great tools that show how teams and individuals are moving forward is Kanban Board.  Kanban board is widely used in any type of industry, where some products are produced like in manufacturing or IT. But there is nothing against leveraging it for other fields like HR or even accounting. This board is designed to visualise workflow to identify and limit work in progress. The secret of this tool is its simplicity. The board consists of a minimum of three columns: to-do, doing, and done, where tasks are moved from left to right to show progress and help perform a work (more on Kanban Board). The huge power of this board is to give team members the physical ability to move their own tasks forward from to-do to doing, from doing to done. It creates in people a true sense of accomplishment when they can see in front of their eyes how tasks are getting status done.

Remove obstacles and toxins

Ok, we can see with our eyes of imagination how we are moving tasks on board without any interference, but it is not a reality. Most of the time during the day we must struggle with many obstacles like not responsive people, irrational procedures or not working processes and tools. It is even worse when the success of our tasks depends on others’ work, and whether we want it or not, we need to wait for their availability. All of those can in a magician’s way turn progress into setbacks. Setbacks can be more powerful than progress because of their dark nature of experience. Managers should be aware of that force and support their subordinates to solve those issues to reduce as much as possible any frustration. Longer setbacks weaker people’s motivation and lead to a negative inner work life that destroys someone’s efficiency.

Celebrate daily progress

How about starting a new brand day with recognition for yesterday? If you made yesterday’s progress, why not celebrate it? For that, you can introduce a daily stand-up meeting, when you share with a team yesterday’s achievements, ideally in some visualized form. Present such metrics as won deals, new prospects, number of processed documents or produced products, created new ideas for marketing campaigns or resolved incidents. Anything that is meaningful for your team and can represent their engagement in work.

Leverage data

Most of the data which can serve you for this purpose are already available. Currently, most organizations don’t have issues with obtaining data but with making sense of them. You just need to ask yourself and your team, what should be displayed on the daily dashboard? What are the main factors or triggers that give them sense of purpose, generate progress, and bring them closer to achieving committed goals? What data they would like to see because they can alert them that things are getting out of track?

Principles of the daily dashboard for progress tracking

Focus on daily tasks

If your team supports customers’ incidents maybe, they are not interested in the first place what is a customer satisfaction rate but for sure they are interested in how many incidents were resolved and in which handle time. Customer satisfaction rate can be displayed as beside metric, which gives them sense of purpose and shows the direct impact of their work. But, essential for them are their own tasks, that are mentioned in the job description, because at the end of the day they will be accounted for them.

Design dynamic KPIs and goals

I’m static poses lover as practising yoga is one of the key elements of my lifestyle. However, many do not share my passion. If you want to use KPIs (key performance indicators) as a tool that helps you monitor daily work and makes better decisions, those metrics should be designed to reflect changes on a daily basis if possible. We must keep common sense in here, of course. If work is in weekly cycles, we won’t be able to present any accomplishments during the week, but it doesn’t mean that we can not display progress. Maybe we can present how many issues were open during the day? Or maybe we can present how many of them moved into another status? With that approach, we can track how our work is moving from one point to another and have a chance to notice any blocks or unwanted behaviours.

Design daily benchmarks

Where possible, I encourage creating and using benchmarks. This reference point can act as an alert or goal and its evaluation provides meaningful information about the quality and performance of your work. This benchmark can be designed based on the average performance of previous days or weeks or established as the desired goal.

Show critical alerts

What should be included on a daily dashboard, in addition to progress, are metrics monitoring critical processes. Many companies have commitments that translate into specific actions. One such is, for example, the SLA (service level agreement). Most of us have experienced those SLAs when complaining or returning a product to an online shop. In both cases, the deadline for consideration of the complaint and the return of funds is agreed upon. Look for those critical KPIs and don’t miss them from your radar.

Create positive narration

Last but not least, remember to design a daily dashboard in a manner to boost people’s motivation not the opposite. Focus more on team effort than individual performance (see my post about the cooperative vs. competitive approach). Try not to overwhelm them with details. They should see a clear path to their success. Give them actionable metrics which can be managed and improved by the team. Most people like to feel that they are sitting behind the driving wheel.

Make more impact by empowering your one-to-one meetings with data.

COVID-19 was a game changer regarding our ways of working. Many companies were forced to change a typical on-site work style for remote work. That shift had pros and cons like everything does. On the pros surveys reveal better work-life balance, commuting time savings, or performance increase. On the other hand, managers notice risks in a higher rate of employees leaving. One of the biggest cons of remote work is that employees lose attachment with the company. The main reason is a lack of social interaction with peers and involvement in creating specific organisational culture. But the second is weak identification with the brand that often relates to the office and office events. Managers are brainstorming how to bring back people again to the offices and gain their loyalty, but in the post-pandemic world, it is not so obvious how to achieve it. Rules changed and nothing remains the same as it was.

I believe that everyone needs to feel purpose in life and feel that his work is meaningful. For me understanding how I contribute to the overall strategy, goals or company’s vision is essential. Many times, we lack those connections because of poor communication from the management side and a vague understanding of our role in the entire organization. Fortunately, we have a bunch of communication tools that can be used to improve mutual understanding and keep employees satisfied with their positions.

One of those I find helpful is one-to-one conversations. The one-to-one conversation has great potential in tracking performance, and most of the time they are only used for that. But what is much more important is having a deep and honest discussion with employees about their thoughts, sentiments, and aspirations. That knowledge gives managers the opportunity to react fast when a loss in interest is observed. However, be honest with yourself, how often do you have a feeling that your one-to-ones are not effective as they could be? What are they still missing?

From my long record, I rarely recall that those discussions were supported by some good information. In the majority, discussions were driven by opinions rather than facts. Wouldn’t be great to have evidence for our gut feelings? That precious time is too often wasted simply because companies don’t provide adequate tools to make those meetings more valuable and beneficial for organisations, managers, and employees. Writing “tools”, means collecting, analysing, transforming, and presenting relevant data to make sure that people are talking about facts, and not opinions. And yes, nothing stands in the way to use data for one-to-one meetings.

Of course, the selection of data and KPIs will differ across industries, businesses, and roles. However, some of those remain the same. The biggest challenge is asking the right questions and finding data that respond to them. The great starting point in the journey of creating KPIs that give you meaningful data-based one-to-one conversations are:

1. Company strategy & goals,
2. And the job description.

Company strategy &goals

As I wrote above, people like to feel purpose and connection. Why not use a narrative from the big picture down to the bottom and show employees how does he or she participate in the company’s growth? The more tangible connections between the employee’s daily work and the company’s performance you can find, the higher satisfaction the employee can have. Most organizations cascade down their goals. Thanks to that, we can simply provide proper KPIs and data visualizations to present departments, teams, or individuals’ contributions.

So, before the next one-to-one, if you do not do it already, would be good to talk with the business intelligence team, the sales team, or the finance team to get some shareable data about the business growth and current progress toward goals and the contribution share of your team.

Job description

The job description includes all expectations toward a specific role that can be converted into questions tracked by data. Typically, the job description has two parts that we can use for our purpose. First are responsibilities, second qualifications and skills. Responsibilities can shape our questions about current performance toward goals, finding challenges and their proper solutions or give us a clue on how to prioritise hot issues. Qualifications and skills are a great introduction to talk about employee directions of development, their ambitions and future career paths.

Business case

As a business case, I’ll use the Product Owner role. Depending on the industry’s and an organization’s characteristics main responsibilities, qualifications and skills can differ. However, for the purpose of this post, I’m picking those:

• Develops, owns, and executes product roadmap.
• Prioritizes and maintains the sprint backlog for assigned products, balancing the requirements of stakeholders.
• Translates product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements including features, user stories, and acceptance test criteria.

Expectations reflected in data

The product roadmap is one of the key drivers of success in delivering products. Without a strong and clear vision of what the product is and which characteristics and functionalities it has, it would be hard to develop anything. As a Product Owner, you should often review and update the roadmap to make sure that the vision of the product still reflects the market demands. On the other hand, the product roadmap is a base for the product backlog that consists of features or /and user stories that workload estimation gives the Product Owner a feeling about timely delivery. So, what kind of KPIs should we track to make sure that the roadmap is still valid?

Do all milestones are on the product roadmap?

The product roadmap usually includes milestones or bigger chunks that are broken down into smaller pieces like features and user stories. Tracking something that is not visible is a complicated task. Having one big picture of what is planned gives you the opportunity for proactive conversation. Having the possibility to see all relevant tasks for each milestone makes you ensure that you didn’t forget anything highly important.

Does the product backlog cover the product roadmap?

The first measure that could be interesting to track is the number of tasks under each milestone. The alert could be set up for those milestones without any created tasks. If you have the possibility to track the progress of the task, it gives you a feeling that pace of work is aligned with assumptions or is it faster or slower. You can then discuss options.

Do we have enough resources to deliver the agreed functionalities on time?

Time and money are always tied together. Looking at the roadmap we need to guess somehow the amount of work that is needed for development. For that, we can use story points, or man-days, or any other measure that allows us to compare team capabilities with the required workload. As a result, we can have a positive or negative gap. We wouldn’t trouble ourselves too much as long as we had a positive gap, but the questions would arise with a negative one. Should we narrow the scope or maybe find other people to help us?

Do features/user stories well-prepared for developers?

This question can reveal if tasks for developers are ready for development, or if some issues must be clarified still. We can use here RAG (Red for not ready, Amber for those in progress, Green for those that are ready) approach that gives us the status of tasks’ readiness. This status review opens a discussion about issues and challenges on a very low level that in the end can have a tremendous effect on the entire product development. To create RAG status, think about the most important entries, or fields on your feature/user story template. Then you can use a simple sum or a weighted one to calculate the indicator. Add conditions to differentiate between red, amber, and green (or not ready, in progress, ready). Now you have KPI to see which task needs more of your attention or has some issues to address.

To track these data, you do not even need fancy tools. The Excel spreadsheet will work perfectly. Of course, if you have the possibility to use more advanced business intelligence tools, please do not hesitate 😊

Addressing aspirations and ambitions

Most people I have known have their own aspirations and desires regarding professional and private life. Most of them if they cannot fulfil them in the current workplace are starting to look around for more favourable conditions. That is why the manager should remember to leave enough space for one-to-one conversations for discussing topics regarding employee growth. But again, the discussion is an exchange of opinions. Can we find some data to visualise how much time and effort is spent on learning and mastering skills activities?

More and more companies offer their employees learning platforms just to name a few Udemy, Coursera, and EDX. They are perceived as tremendous benefits by employees but only when they are allowed to allocate some time for learning. In the interest of any organization should be staff development. It has so many positive aspects for both sides, the employer, and the employees. I have an experience among organizations which had entirely different approaches to peoples’ growth. Some of them didn’t care at all about these needs, some of them gave the opportunity to learn but after working hours, some of them understood it as an investment and some of them required upskilling but without providing any courses or giving room for learning. But it totally different topic.

My point is that if you have such platforms in your organizations, maybe you can leverage them for:

• Verify together with your subordinate which courses would be relevant for mastering skills required in her/his position,
• Prepare together learning path,
• Agree on timelines,
• Allocate time per day/week/month for learning.

Most learning platforms share data or even provide built-in reports about users’ activity like a list of chosen training, amount of time spent in the application and on training, or progress on lecturer or practical activities. Isn’t it a great mine of information? Armed with such knowledge we can bring to the table tangible insights and have a proper conversation about employee growth. What we can definitely review in the first place is whether a person has the opportunity to use the dedicated time for learning or is snowed under with daily tasks. Or the exact opposite if you are sure that a person is not overloaded with work why she or he doesn’t take classes as is agreed? Another point for discussion can be reviewing new learnings and figuring out how this fresh knowledge can be applied to business, or if the subject is still relevant or should be changed. As you can see having those data we can start even think more strategically about the development of teams, departments, and entire organizations.

The above examples are only a small sample of enriching one of the processes within the organization. The huge challenge in making organizations data-driven is to design relative key performance indicators and create a habit of using them unconsciously by people. The main strategy to achieve that is simply to weave data into almost every process. The result can be that employees won’t think about data as something separately but as an integral step for achieving their goals. Establishing that common culture in the organization will support gaining market advantage like never before.

How to present numbers involved in people tragedies?

Every day, we have been bombarded with news about people cruelty toward other people or animals and natural and unnatural disasters that result in many deaths. It is now even doubled because of COVID-19 and its death toll. You could say that there is nothing spectacular in it. From the first time man set foot on Earth: Famine, Plague and War are our inseparable companions, and in the era when we plan to conquer the Universe, they are still not defeated.

However, most of these terrifying scenes are somewhere long distance from our safe and cosy homes. In addition, we are overwhelmed by violence presented in mass media. That gives us the impression that those situations are unrealistic and abstract. We hardly attach them to real people, victims and it is going to be even worse as we learnt from the latest studies about decreasing empathy.

For instance, I experience the same feeling of indifference when looking at COVID-19 statistics. These are ONLY numbers. Dehumanized numbers like production series or kilometres run in your tracking app. And that scares me a lot.

A situation when people (or any other living creature) are presented as a sequence of numbers scares me. When we use some abstract forms to identify persons, there is a danger that we will perceive them as objects and not as subjects. I witnessed behaviours involving the use of employee numbers in internal communication and it was a part of the culture. For me, this approach detached living people from their formal functions and roles. Roles become impersonal. There are no people, there are only cogs in the machine or resources to use and to get rid of when used.

So how to present numbers and communicate real people tragedies?

Language

Another thing is the language used to describe victims. Many times, the word “case”, “deaths” or “fatal accident” replaces words “wounded people”, “died people”, “victims”. Especially in medical statistics like presented in Figure 1 number of people who died and recovered from COVID-19 (statistics for a particular point in time).

Using abstract forms do not help in building vivid pictures in the mind of our audience of happy people, who recovered from the awful disease and went back to their families or plunged in grief over the loss of their loved ones. And this is what we would like to achieve – move their imagination to evoke their feelings.

Which of those subtitles in Figure 1 are more dramatic?

Figure 1

Numbers

People, in general, have problems with understanding big numbers, statistics and abstract visual forms presenting the information. The numbers in Figure 1 are so enormous that is hard to imagine them. To convey information effectively we must downsize it and chunk to the well-known, familiar, and easy to interpret elements.

In Figure 2 we can see the percentage of how many people died vs recovered from COVID -19. I used the abstract visual form to present information – pie chart and impersonal, medical description – death rate, closed cases. Nothing about victims.

Figure 2

How can we interpret this picture? If we are good at maths and understand the concept behind percentages, we can have the impression that 2% is a quite low chance to die of COVID-19 and there is no big deal (I won’t vaccinate myself! It’s a mystification to implant a chip on me!). And again, using the word doesn’t help us understand a real, current threat. “Death” for most of us is a metaphysical conception that lies somewhere in the far distant future.

Iconographic

To downsize information and present it in a more readable format, we can use graphical representation, small objects that symbolize humans. This approach lets an audience understand the range of coronavirus death toll because the big number was chunked into small pieces (1 out of 50). Number 50 is much closer to our imagination than 5 613 594. Using human symbols I emphasized that numbers are related to people.

Do you feel now more or less certain that COVID-19 is not a big deal?

Figure 3

Time

We can use the time to strengthen our message significantly when we embedded our audience into the present moment and convert statistics into occurrences. With this tactic, we can easily emphasise how human life is fragile because when you are reading this text every nine-second someone passes away because of the corona virus (again I used a 2% death rate). You can use animated gifs to be more dramatic.

How do you feel now with this knowledge?

Figure 4

I do not say that standard data visualisations are bad, and we should not use numbers or statistics. I just want to challenge anyone who communicates information to a wide audience to tailor better channels to make sure that a message gets properly understood, and people will start looking again at those who suffer… with appropriate respect.

Map your maps.

During the holidays season, I’m having more time to catch up watching movies. On that long list a film “Another round” can be found. In a nutshell, the plot is about four friends and their unexpected alcohol experiment. Everything is done in the spirit of science, of course. In truth, this dark comedy-drama touches on a very sensitive social problem that affects many people around the world.

I’m wondering how Poland looks compared to other European countries and if Poles on average drink more or less in comparison to Danes? According to WHO (World Health Organization) data from 2018 average Pole drinks 11.71 pure alcohol and Dane 10.26 (15+ years). The difference is 1.45. Is Poland near or far from Denmark? Depending on the colour palette and applied scale we can perceive it differently, and consequently, convey different stories or draw misleading conclusions.

5 stepped colour

I used Tableau Public to visualize data. This visualization is automatically chosen by Tableau. According to the visualization, Poles are not in the lead for European countries and Danes are somewhere in the middle of the scale.

3 stepped colour

But wait a minute. What a shame! Poles are heavy drinkers. Now I can see it clearly.

7 stepped colour

OMG… how much beer average Czech had to drink to win this competition? When it comes to Poland, it is not so bad. Poland is near the middle of the range.

Reversed 3 stepped colour

Hm… I’m a little bit confused. I have the impression that Poles don’t avoid occasions to celebrate the fragility of life, but now I can see is opposite. (Who would check legend description? Waist of time, data visualizations are intuitive!)

Attention: Remember in our culture stronger colour saturation means increased occurrence of the phenomenon.

As we can see, each of the four above examples depicts the same information differently, and that difference can be significant.

Maps are commonly used in public media and people like them. The same is in the business world. However, knowing it from experience, it is very easy to manipulate information presented on maps. Before you publish or share your map ask yourself:

• Does scale represent the statistic bins,
• Are colours adjusted to the topic,
• Is reverse scale justified?

Data source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.ALC.PCAP.MA.LI?view=map

Mind the Gap! – How visualizing missing data influences people’s trust in data quality and affects decision-making processes.

The ethical approach to data visualization has many faces. One of them is dealing with missing data and the way of communicating them to the audience. In the real world, we face situations that our databases are incomplete.  This is a common case of many reasons. Some are technical errors that can occur during ETL processes, others appear when data is collected manually, especially as a result of surveys, as people often fail to answer all questions.

Statistical procedures often eliminate entire records when only one variable is missing. This leads to a dramatic shortage of statistical samples. However, many times, even though our data is leaky like Swiss cheese, we have to present them and what is even worse, draw conclusions, because having 100% of data is in many cases ineffective and unrealistic in terms of costs and time.

Statistical approach

To stay honest with our audience and to present the observations or phenomenon to them in the most transparent way, we have only two options: to present gaps in the data or imputed data in place of missing data. There are several imputation methods widely used in statistics and statistic data modelling. The most common ones are:

• Case deletion – omitting cases with incomplete data and not take them to analysis.
• Zero-filling – imputation of value 0 for all missing data.
• Linear interpolation – replacing missing data with estimated values.
• Marginal means – the mean value of variable is used instead of missing one.

More explanations of the specific methods you can find here.

Nevertheless, what method we are going to use, we need to communicate to the audience about which data comes from observations and which ones are imputed. This communication should be given in voice and visual form to strengthen the message leave no room for presumptions.

Dilemma – show gaps or imputed data?

Many strategic decisions are data-driven and missing data impacts the overall understanding, interpretation and reasoning of a phenomenon if not properly addressed.

Recently I found interesting research by Hayeong Song and Danielle Albers Szafir that shed some light on how we visually communicate missing data, which has a significant influence on data quality perception and on confidence in drawing conclusions. Research emphasizes that visualizations that highlight missing data but do not break visual continuity are perceived by responders as those with higher data quality. The general conclusion is that imputation methods are better graphical choices than simply removal of information as they do not decrease perceived data quality as much that have consequences in the decision-making process. However, the very important aspect is to highlight imputed data by different shapes or colours. Another interesting graphical decision is to present imputed data as error bars. It gives our audience additional information about the likely range of values.

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The research results in Figure 5 (b) clearly show that linear interpolation has the greatest positive impact on the perceived quality and accuracy of the data, and the visualization with data absent (Figure 4 (a)) is the lowest.

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The research was carried out for two commonly known visualization: a line chart and a bar chart. Both graphical choices gave similar outcomes.

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Conclusion

I have several books which are like a shining star that guides me through the darkness. One of them is “The Little Prince” Antoine de Saint-Exupery and quote from that book: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed”. I believe we should have exactly the same approach to our analyses and their graphical representations as data analysts or data storytellers.

My personal attitude towards data – ethics in data storytelling.

On September 26, 1983, in the middle of the Cold war, Russian lieutenant Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the command centre of the nuclear early-warning system. The system reported that six missiles were fired from the US toward the ZSSR. Petrov based on provided information had to decide whether the alarm was true or false and to obey or not obey orders. After countless minutes that seemed to be an eternity, Petrov judged that it was a false alarm and saved the world against third war – the nuclear for sure. Later, the investigation revealed that the system malfunctioned.

But what kind of the world could we live in now if Petrov had not considered other options of the system’s response? Having that historical event in mind, can we trust any information without a doubt?

As data analysts or data storytellers, we are like a nuclear early-warning system. We provide people with the information they need to make critical decisions and shape the future. It is a very responsible role.

Why is so hard not to lie with data?

Does it sound controversial?  I believe so. Does it sound realistic? For sure. Why do I think so? Are you confident that you know all aspects of a subject that you want to present to others? Have you considered all possible options and looked at them from all involved stakeholders’ perspectives? Are you sure that the data set time period is long enough, and data quality is high? There are more questions than answers. So, tell me which version of the truth you are holding in your visualizations?

I do not accuse anybody to mislead people on purpose. Most of the time when we prepare data analysis and data visualizations to communicate information, we have pure intentions. The case is that we hold some biases and believes, and our brain uses previous experiences, and constantly makes unconscious assumptions. All that influences our thoughts and perception.

Harmful data visualization

Let’s do the mental exercise and think together about how harmful data visualization can be. Currently, I’m reading an exciting book by one of the most recognizable authors of the information visualization domain Alberto Cairo “How charts lie”. In one of the chapters, there is a story about nationalist Dylann Roof, who killed several Afro-Americans by being influenced by some charts that presented a number of crimes vs ethnic roots. That shocked me and opened my eyes to the potential consequences of distributing misleading visual representations of data.

That warning is more for data journalists and other people who juggle with data publicly. Often to get more votes or support or to influence some kind of the audience line of thinking. However, even in the business environment, we must be cautious not to make the same mistakes, because results can be catastrophic and have a real impact on people. Nevertheless, all of us should remember that when we share any data on social media or on other web pages.  

The potential negative impact of wrongly done analysis and poor data visualizations:

• Hundreds of people can lose their job,
• Profitable business sector can be shut down,
• Launch of a new product can miss the target,
• Thousands or billions of people can be at threat because of the release of the new drug.

This vulnerability is real because people who make decisions make history. There is always a human factor in any success or failure.

Do you feel like an influencer?

Some time ago I had a lot of fun preparing and sharing data visualization. But currently, I’m not so eager to do that. I didn’t have enough confidence in the data that are available, and I don’t have enough time to dive into and understand the specific subject, make analyses and investigations.

In upcoming posts, I’ll focus on ethics from a data visualizations point of view. The first one is data range.

Data range

Insights could differ very much in case of changing data scope. Anyone who has some shares on the stock market knows that depending on the selected time range he or she can observe positive or negative trends. The same cognitive dissonance we can have presenting data within our organization. Maybe in the last two years, we achieved tremendous revenue growth, but looking at revenue from a longer perspective, it can turn out that we even got closer to the results from the financial crisis (pick your favourite one as an example, they come and go periodically).

Figure 1 depicts what kind of understanding and feeling the investor can have to look at the same data but from different ranges. The left chart can indicate that results are declining, but when we look at the right one, we can see that in the longer perspective trend is positive.

Figure 1

Of course, our narration can be built around the latest two years of growth, but we shouldn’t hide information from the bigger picture. The approach in such a case should be to display the bigger picture first – a longer period of data is displayed and then zoom in on the last two years to present factors of recent revenue growth.

Another example, which is notoriously used to present voting results, is presenting people support for particular parties but having only people who voted as the full population. When I listen to the news in the mass media, often people refer to the election results without considering the voter turnout. That narration skews reality. Let’s see the below example. Figure 2 shows the result of the latest presidential elections in Poland. What will most people remember from the chart? That Duda won and had more than 50% of public support.

Figure 2

But this is not true! The real public support for Duda was 34.49% if we consider the voter turnout. The voter turnout in this election was 68.18%. It means that 31.82% of Poles didn’t go on the election. I would love to see in the mass media charts which present the entire election results, including those who didn’t vote. Then we would have the complete picture of people’s political preferences. However, I still see truncated data scope.

Figure 3

By manipulating data range as a timeline or included/excluded categories, we tell different stories about data and evoke different understandings and feelings in our audience about the subject. Let’s remember that to not lose in translation the most objective view possible.

How to better design dashboards and reports. Data Storytelling in BI products design.

Not everyone has an opportunity to be on the first line and present data in front of the audience. Many are silent data heroes at the back of the stage. They constantly work with data to make sense of them and pass it on to others.

I know from my experience that in many organizations people work in silos, and it can be a tangible barrier in delivering well-designed, actionable dashboards. The best option to overcome this phenomenon is to make an effort and find end-users to gather their requirements and tailor reports for their specific needs. Only in this way you can find out what the true story should be built around a particular data set. The rest is a piece of cake.

Nevertheless, if you are one of that data heroes, to be honest, you are the true master here. You decide which data sets will be distributed within your organization and to what extent.  So, you may not be presenting the results in front of the audience, but they are likely seeing them with your eyes.

However, it is a double-edged sword. Having great influence results in having huge responsibility. It is a challenge for every communicator, and you are a kind of communicator because you prepare and hand down information.

I will just present only a few which I find very useful, and I often use them in my work. These technics are easy to remember and easy to implement, so everyone can benefit from them. They have similar usage as linguistic construction which can influence you to buy or do something.

We will go through:

• Colour
• Size
• Shape
• Common region
• Position

COLOR

Humans see colours, maybe not in such spectacular range like other animals (check this article about hummingbirds), but still it is one of the most important senses that helps us understand the world and allows us to run away from wild animals in the jungle.

When it comes to designing dashboards, use colours to lead the audience from point to point. It is important to use just several ones. There is a good rule of five. Take five colours, assign to them meaning as for example white – the main colour for background, grey – major of data in data visualization, dark blue – numbers, black – text and icons, and orange – focal points. You can extend orange to orange and green if you want to differentiate positive and negative results.

In such way, you use colours on purpose and teach the audience their role in conveying the message.

To illustrate that we can compare these two pictures. Both charts present the same information – sales of regions. But the chart on the left side doesn’t promote any region. We can see all of them equally. It just aggregates information and presents them on the graph. However, the chart on the right side emphasises one of the regions (yes, that chart is created for the north region manager) by making it orange ( the darkest colour) and the rest regions greyish and tells a story about this specific region performance. The rest of the regions give context to the story.

Due to that simple change, you draw attention to one region and force others to look at it closely with avoiding special interest in other regions.

SHAPE / SIZE

What else you can use to push some information in front of another? Humans can see easily changes in sizes or shapes, so why not to use it for our purpose? Especially when we remember about people who have some colour seeing difficulties. Size and shape are another visual channel which can be used to spotlight some data. Make it bigger, make it stronger.

When we change solid line of North to dashed one and thicken it, our brain processes information even faster than before, because we use three visual channels to code this information: colour, shape, and size.

Even when we take out colour and leave visualization black and white (which sometimes serves the best for better contrast), we can still achieve the same result.

Size cannot be introduced in all visualizations. Would be hard to do it with bar chart. But regarding shape it is much easier. You can use pattern to fill in North bar.

Size is essential for presenting numbers. Differing numbers sizes, we control which of them play the first fiddle and which ones are providing additional information. Shape can be manifested in font type or its boldness. But we must remember here about the parent rule of readability. There is a general rule that on dashboards we use sans serif fonts because they are without any additional decorations and work better for displaying on screens.

Unexpectedly, font types can evoke some emotions or can reflect word meaning in their look. It is especially handy when you are about to design infographics.  See examples.

COMMON REGION

Do you know that people tend to group and interpret objects which are in the close or shared areas? This principle has even its own name as the Law of Common Region and was devised by Gestalt group in 1920s.

I’m a hard user of that techniques when it comes to design dashboards. A single piece of information itself has no impact, however, when you connect a few dots together, the message can be powerful. To make it happen, it is important to create a common area for these elements. We can do this by adding background or border and create visual boundaries.

POSITION

Studies regarding how people view websites, commonly known as Eyetracking, are consistent in results. The area with the greatest attention is the top-left corner of the page follows by the top-right corner, then the down-left and the last one is the down-right corner (see image below).

source

Of course, that we can use it to support data storytelling! Just divide a dashboard area into four quadrants and follow these two simple rules:

• In 1&2 place information which you want to highlight as KPIs, the crucial changes in trends, threats and opportunities, and components which are essential to navigate on the dashboard.  Do not forget about the title. Use the best practices of designing UX (check this link about best practices in UX and find out what we have in common with goldfish).
• In 3 & 4 are additional information that broadens perspectives or sheds another light on the already presenting data. At the bottom is the great place to place information about last data refresh, or report confidentiality.

Data storytelling is a mix of knowledge about data visual presentation, design and people perception. Having these components in place you are armed with a very powerful tool, which makes the audience listening to your voice…, even when this voice is behind dashboards that you deliver.

Data storytelling for busy people – strategies which always work

Do you need to know how to tell stories with data?

Ask yourself how often do you use data in your daily job? Or maybe how many times do you use data to convince others to your ideas? If your answers range from rarely to often, then this post is for you.

One scene from the movie “Silver linings playbook” stuck in my memory. The main character after having an explosion caused by hearing his wedding song, is sitting in the therapist’s office, and complaining that it would not have happened if that song had not been played in the therapist’s office. The response of the therapist was clear and brief “You need to build your own strategy how not to be afraid of that song”.

Building strategies helps us to be more productive and perform better, whether it is in our work environment or our private life. Our brain just loves mental shortcuts, and strategies are those shortcuts.  Especially when we are in a hurry and need simple solutions which always work.

 Let’s see what strategies we can prepare to make data communication more effective and efficient.

Comparisons

Comparisons are always a good choice when we want to present the progress of initiatives, outcomes of introducing new processes, or showcase sales performance in different markets. People compare things in their brains all the time, so any story based on comparison will be easy to understand. But it needs to be well-crafted.

Before and After

This strategy works well when delivering outcomes of recently introduced new initiatives or processes. Old state data is the best background to emphasize big change or the success of a new approach. You can present benefits or results in several dimensions: process, employees’ satisfaction, increase in a number of clients etc. Anything you deem valuable for your business.

As an example, we can put together two dimensions: employee’s satisfaction and a number of human errors. In Picture 1, it is easy to see that changes have improved the employees’ satisfaction and resulted in a decrease in human errors. Simple column charts displayed side by side will suffice to represent this data. Adding lines connecting columns makes visualizations more suggestive.

Picture 1

Us vs. All

Every good manager should brag about her or his team and highlight what a great job they do for the organization. If your team, the product, sales, or converted leads are the best, show how they stand out from the rest of the company.

To draw attention to your data, you can change its colour. This simple trick will distinguish your data from the others and push it to the foreground. See Picture 2.

Picture 2

Where are my stars?

When analysing revenue growth, we consider what is pushing it forward and what is holding it back. A very popular concept is to present leaders and laggers. The popularity of this concept stems from human nature. We admire and envy the best, but love the worst because they are worse off than we are!

C-Levels managers like to see contributors of the growth on the waterfall chart because this visualization shows at a glance which contributors have made money for the company and which have lost. For our revenue growth example, we can use two different colours to indicate leaders and laggers.

Picture 3

Changes over time

Changes over time are the next group of strategies which use the familiar comparative idea with a whole story set in time.  We can present how something develops over time and what is more appealing for our audience how it might be in the future. For such stories, we use line charts.

Show me the bright future!

Who would not want to know the future? Well, I do not… But, when it comes to the business environment the answer is always: everyone. When I work with clients, the trend of any phenomenon is a must. Many decisions within an organization are based on current trends and an estimation of future outcomes.

However, every data scientist will warn against relying too much on historic data. There is a strong tendency to predict future business performance behaviour based on past results. To temper expectations, we can provide several scenarios based on the same dataset. This approach will add value to our analysis if we introduce factor parameters to each scenario. Typically, three scenarios are provided: optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic.

To illustrate the technique, I will use an example with revenue growth (every CEO cares about revenue growth). The main factor in the example could be the launch of product A in a new market. As we all know, launching a product on a new market can be a huge success, but on the other hand, it can also be a spectacular failure.  Using sales of product A as a parameter, we can create three separate revenue scenarios for the upcoming fiscal year.

Picture 4

Factors of success or failure.

Another story which is attractive for the audience is about factors which influenced the results of the phenomenon. This narration is based on our natural tendency to look for cause and effect relationships. Maybe if we knew what had triggered results in the past, we could use it in the future to prevent bad impact or use identified factors to achieve better outcomes?  This strategy is great when you want to convince senior managers to spend money on the next marketing campaign. Simply show them the periods with and without marketing campaigns on the line chart, where they can easily observe the ups and downs of the line representing sales. Do not forget to add some call outs to strengthen a message. See picture 5.

Picture 5

Connecting dots

The last strategy which I want to bring closer to you is about presenting the most crucial business metrics on the one-pager. This strategy is a master level, because whoever prepares it must be aware of connections between separate metrics and the overall influence which they have on the business health. This is very practical when trying to understand which processes drive others. The one-pager can show usual suspects, threats, and opportunities. For instance, if your core business as a company partner is selling services to the specific hardware, you can expect a drop in sales if hardware sales fall down.

Picture 6

Embrace diversity – how to design data visualizations for people with visual impairments.

Have you ever thought that it is possible to discriminate people through data visualization design? Several years ago, it sounded strange to me too, but indeed, it can be done unconsciously if you are not aware of the topic.

Discrimination is most often associated with skin colour, gender, age, religious beliefs, or nationality. However, this negative social phenomenon can have much broader spectrum. One of them, not at all intuitive, is data visualizations practices. The topic is gaining importance as more and more data is used to explain global processes, and those with difficulties in that area are being left behind. It may not be simple, but the onus is on data community and data visualization practitioners to develop new best practices to communicate data in more democratic way with those with difficulties in this area in mind.

To make data visualization more accessible to a wider audience, three dimensions can be improved: vision, cognitive and learning difficulties, and motor capabilities. The basic, obvious difficulty is related with vision impairments; but the degree of impairment is key. I will not discuss the most severe degree, which is blindness (this is a topic for different post), but I will bring closer the subject of colour-blindness and low vision impairments.

COLOUR BLINDNESS

In data visualization, colour is the most important communication channel. The ability to see and understand the meaning of colours helped our ancestors to survive in deep jungles or on savannas. Colour informed them about non-toxic food or allowed them to spot predators in the forest.

Today, we are still sensitive to colours and these naturals reactions are used in many ways. For instance, most warning signals use red colour, because we naturally associate it with danger or action (red is a colour of the blood)^[1]. Studies show that prolonged exposure to the red colour can cause the heart rate to accelerate as a result of activating the “fight or flight” instinct^[2]. In opposite, blue colour has a calming effect.

However, not everyone can see colours. Approximately about 10% of human population has trouble seeing colours correctly. If you would like to deepen your knowledge about types of colour-blindness, please check the website. There you can learn about causes of colour-blindness, test yourself, and find a tool to check if prepared visualization is in line with best practices.

There are several basic principles that improve your colour palette and enable visualization for broader audience. To understand them we need to understand two important colour properties:  hue, and saturation. Hue defines colour in terms of pink, blue, yellow, or magenta. Saturation is nothing more than volume of the colour. By juggling these main properties we can improve or worsen results of our work.

RED-GREEN

First of all, stop using red-green palette which is confusing or even unrecognizable to colour-blinded people. This is my humble recommendation. For most people with colour difficulties this red and green colour look the same (see Picture 1).

Picture 1

Most modern data visualization tools, such as Tableau or Power BI already have available colour palettes that handle with the topic. Both mentioned tools have also option to create custom compositions and upload them to the application (custom colour palettes for Tableau and Power BI).

If you are wondering about the right colour palettes, check out the ones presented on Picture 2 and Picture 3. They are nice, clean, and fancy and will work for any reports.

Picture 2 – Vivid & Energetic

Picture 3 – Elegant & Sophisticated

CONFUSING COLOUR PAIRS

Even though we try to avoid the red-green colour range there are still other pairs that resulted in similar way. In recent years I have been observing the dizzying career of the grey-blue duet. I like this combination as well, however, it is essential to match them wisely (see Picture 4).

Picture 4

MONOCHROMATIC SCALE

Sometimes the best option is to simply stick with one colour and play with its saturation to differentiate specific categories or data ranges (see Picture 5). This approach can be used in most visualizations.

Picture 5

More practical colour ranges you can find here, and if you would like to test your composition on specific charts use this website.

SHAPE

Another interesting channel we can use to help visually impaired people easily distinguish between coded data is to assign shapes to different data categories. A good example of how the introduction of shapes can make difference is the well-known RAG.

RAG stands for RED-AMBER-GREEN and is widely used in business environment to communicate performances, risks or statuses of activities. It is most commonly used in project management to report status of tasks, but due to its simplicity, it is also used in data visualization to highlight for instance KPIs (key performance indicators) performance. Red indicates about underperforming, amber that something is an issue and needs to be monitored, and green that is fine.

But as you already know RED-GREEN can be very confusing for colour-blind people. So, my suggestion is to use a shape as another visual communication channel to make sure everyone is on the same page. Instead of format with coloured background, it would be better to introduce icons that have different shape and are coloured in red, amber, or green (see Picture 6).

Picture 6

But what about charts like line chart or bar chart? How can we improve distinction between specific lines or bars? We can use different patterns to distinguish one bar from the rest one or to present several lines on one chart (see Picture 7).

Picture 7

WRITTEN INSIGHTS

Written descriptions, recommendations or insights can be tricky. Especially when you want to use colour names to emphasise certain points, data categories or issues. How someone, who does not see green colour (see Picture 1) can understand a message “All departments represented by green bars have exceeded their sales targets this year”? This message must be rewritten to “Departments A,B, and C have exceeded their sales targets this year” to ensure that all stakeholders understand it.

LOW VISION

In addition to the most recognizable challenge, which is colour blindness in data visualizations design, there is another related to vision loss due to age, accidents, or genetics. For those who suffers from low vision, we must remember that size and contrast of displayed text matters. Especially when we display some materials on screens in conference rooms, but even when you present something via communicators as Teams, or Zoom, size matters. You can read more about the topic here.

SIZE

When it comes to the font size, there is no one good recommendation. It depends on the purpose. If you are going to display materials at a conference in a large conference room, it is better not to use smaller fonts than 18 when describing axes or legend and have less information on the slides. There is nothing wrong in having more readable slides rather than fewer but cluttered.

A different approach can be taken when creating reports. I would say use a font size 9 or 10 for axis or legend description, but in no other case should you go lower than 12. In reports crucial thing is to group information together or to display them in close proximity to make it easier to interpret or make decisions. That is why optimizing space is so important. These screens can always be enlarged, and anyone can take advantage of them.

Picture 8

CONTRAST

The general rule is to maintain high contrast between background and foreground (e.g. white – black, black – white). A typical accessible barrier for people with low contrast sensitivity is grey text or figures on a light background. However, for some people better combination is with lower contrast, because they suffer from the bright background (e.g. they have to change a screen background to the darker to be able read what is on the screen).

As you can see there is no single best answer how to approach this challenge. A good practice is to give people the option to change the display mode from bright (light background and dark foreground) to dark one (dark background and light foreground).

Picture 9

By these small changes, we are bringing better user experience in our organizations or widely, if we prepare data visualizations for the media or other public usage.

[1]https://rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3856

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244014525423