Thirsty Crow
What did you learn?
Presented by:
DR. NISHA ARORA
Using Visuals, Text or Numbers
Narrative
Arc?
Domopalooza 2018
Credit: Nick Mennon
Why have sales decreased for the first time?
Credit: Nick Mennon
Why have sales decreased for the first time?
Credit: Nick Mennon
What is the Abandaoned Cart Rate?
Credit: Nick Mennon
Twist in the story
Credit: Nick Mennon
Impact on sales
“Storytelling is needed when the insights are hard
or challenging to understand, when the business
impact is high.”
When do you need storytelling?
What insight did you get?
Credit: Avinash Kaushik
What else can we do?
Does it help?
Is it better now?
Did you see any issue?
Isn’t it a better story to tell?
What makes a great data story?
Source : knowledge is beautiful
1. Understand the context
2. Choose an appropriate visual display
3. Eliminate clutter
4. Focus attention where you want it
5. Think like a designer
6. Tell a story
 Exploratory or Explanatory
 Who is your audience?
 What do you need them to know or do?
Credit: Cole
Know your audience
When you’ve choice
Selecting The Appropriate Visual
Selecting The Appropriate Visual
William Cleveland
When you’ve choice
1 categorical variable - Pie chart/ Bar Chart
2 categorical variables - Stacked bar chart/ grouped bar chart
1 numerical variable/ multiple numerical variables – Histograms/ Box
plot
1 numerical variable/ multiple numeric variables - Frequency curve
2 numerical variables - Scatter plot
Between pair of variables - Scatter plot matrix
Bubble chart – 2 numeric variables & up to three categorical variables
[presented by aesthetics of chart]
Box plot – 1 numerical variable/ 1 numeric and upto 2 categorical
variables [ using trellies/ faceting]
Line chart/Area chart – usually time series data
Herarchical data - Treemap/decision tree
 Comparison
 Bar Charts, column chart, line chart, area chart
 Composition
 Pie chart/donut charts, stacked column charts, stacked area charts,
waterfall chart
 Distribution
 Histogram(one variable-few data points), frequency curve(one
variable-many data points), surface curve/3-d area chart(3
variables)
 Relationship
 Scatter plots, Bubble chart, correlogram/scatter plot matrix
Medium
Heat Map
Medium
HeatMap
Can you read this?
Is it misleading?
The use of
non-zero
baseline
460 %
increase
Is it misleading?
13 % increase
The use of
non-zero
baseline
Is it misleading?
The use of non-
zero baseline
Zero Baseline Plot
Notice The Difference
Can you imagine the impact?
Even the title is incorrect!
Do you need interactivity
medium
Do you need inertactivity?
 Cognitive Load
 Data-Ink ratio/Signal-Noise Ratio
 Gestalt principles of visual perception
Before
Credit: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/
Credit: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/
After
Which one is better?
Effective Visuals _ Remove to Improve
Effective Visuals _ Remove to Improve
Effective Visuals _ Remove to Improve
Effective Visuals _ Remove to Improve
Effective Visuals _ Order matters
Can you find the odd one out?
Can you find the odd one out?
Can you find the odd one out?
Can you find the odd one out?
Design concern for a vehicle model
What insight did you get in a glance?
Share your insights
How to do read it now?
How does it help in creating a better data story?
Guess, what’s that?
Break-up Times
Text is your friend
Credit: David McCandless
Aesthetics
Aesthetics
Credit: Cole
Chart type, Focus, & Design
Credit: Cole
Chart type, Focus, & Design
Credit: Evelina
What do you think about this?
And this?
Credit: Evelina
Bad Data Visuals
How can you improve this?
What message did you get?
Credit: Cole
Is this story creating an impact?
Which one is better?
Brainstroming!
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aapkaarvi
ndkejriwal_aap-invested-in-education-and-
the-impact-activity-
6689191753767018496-CUDc
Do you need more like that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics
/politics/2016-election/trump-charts/
 Charts Do’s & Don’ts
https://guides.library.duke.edu/datavis/topten
 Tufte Principle
https://thedoublethink.com/tuftes-principles-for-visualizing-
quantitative-information/
 Junk Charts
http://shar.es/CWUiu
 https://www.visualisingdata.com/
 https://flowingdata.com/
 http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/
 https://informationisbeautiful.net/
 https://iquantny.tumblr.com/
 https://medium.com/nightingale/topics-in-data-viz/home
 https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog
 CN Knaflic: Storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals
 Duarte, Nancy. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
 Few, Stephen. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.
Oakland, CA: Analytics Press, 2004.
 Yau, Nathan. Data Points: Visualization that Means Something. Indianapolis, IN: John
Wiley & Sons, 2013
 Arheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
 Cole N Knief
 Ben Wellington
 Nathan Yau
 Andy Krik
 Kaiser Fung
 David McCandless
http://stats.stackexchange.com/users/79100/nisha-arora
http://stackoverflow.com/users/5114585/nisha-arora
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nisha_Arora2/contributions
https://www.quora.com/profile/Nisha-Arora-9
http://learnerworld.tumblr.com/
https://www.slideshare.net/NishaArora1
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCniyhvrD_8AM2jXki3eEErw/videos
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drnishaarora/
Some of the charts shown in the presentation
are not mine. I’ve taken those from some
books/web resources.
Thank You
Data visualization & Story Telling with Data

Data visualization & Story Telling with Data