Borrowing from the communications and media experts, storyboarding is one of my favorite approaches to work through a data visualization design with a team. First identify your audience & what your data story is, then map it out visually to come to a common understanding of what your team is designing.

1. On Storyboarding as a Data Visualization Tool
A Process for Distilling Long Reports into Data Visualization Products
What are storyboards?
› A graphic representation of how a video or
visualization will unfold.
› Focus on storytelling, plot, flow, and
perspective.
› Often look like comic strips.
› Can be very detailed and visual or more
basic sketches.
Why storyboarding as a data visualization
design tool? Communications experts and
video designers frequently use a visual,
frame-by-frame representation of their
message or plot line as a way to map out how
they want their final product to flow. For data
visualization enthusiasts, the storyboarding
process can be a great way to work with a
team to pull the key messages and data
elements (“story points”) out of a long report
or set of documents and arrange them in
sequence to tell your data story.
Why does this step matter?
This process helps you transition from a long
report and abstract ideas about making an
inforgraphic or other product to tangible
plans. They make it easier for you to share
and explain your vision with your team
and/or a designer and, as a result, facilitate
collaboration and ensure that all of your
collaborators are on the same page. They
emphasize usability and clarity of content and
can ultimately save you time.
So now I have a bunch of post-its on paper
lined up with sketches. What do I do next?
Great work! You’ve done the thinking around
how to tell your story and what elements you
want to visualize. You can use the storyboard
you’ve created to make a slide deck that
someone could use for a highly visual
presentation, to work with a designer (or a
free tool, like Piktochart) to design an
infographic, or create a video based on the
frames you’ve mapped out..
Let’s practice…
Imagine you are a researcher who has just
completed a mid-term evaluation. Your team has
worked hard to write your 50 page evaluation
report, and even summarized your key data
points into a fact sheet. Now, you want to create
an infographic to include in a blog post to spark
interest from other implementers by visually
telling the story from one of your project sites.
You have a two page example of key findings in a
fact sheet from the Senegal Urban Reproductive
Health Initiative provided by the facilitators.
Follow the steps outlined above (highlight key
points, post-it, organize, brainstorm
visualizations) to create your own storyboard.
A simple process from moving
from report to storyboard:
1. Highlight Read your full narrative
document and highlight key data points or
messages. What jumps out at you? What
would your audience want to learn about?
You can do this simultaneously with a
team or on your own.
2. Post-its Write each message or statistic
that you higlighted on a post-it note.
3. Arrange the storyboard Arrange the post-
its in sequence on a large flip chart. Start
thinking through how this story would
unfold on an infographic, in a video, or on
a slidedeck: what would you want your
audience to know first? Are there any
post-its that you don’t need (because they
just add clutter) or anything missing that
you should look for in the document or
from another data source?
4. Brainstorm visualizations Think about how
you’d visualize each piece of information
on an individual post-it and draw small
sketches of what that storypoint could
look like. Don’t aim for perfection here
(we’re not all artists) & try different ideas.