Make DataViz Great Again!

No matter what your role, no matter what the industry, no matter what type of company you work for... every day you are expected to present data in some manner to justify your great ideas, terrible performance, brilliant choices, culture shifting priorities, and more.

Data visualization skills are invaluable not just for analysts. And, with data flooding all aspects of the business, it is core to your ability to influence senior executives. Afterall, visualization is simply telling stories with data.

With that thought in mind, I wanted to share an excerpt from a recent edition of my newsletter (The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect). An example of how you can simplify a story dramatically to improve its power, and 15 rules you can follow as you practice data visualization.

Consider this example... There are two slides used to show performance and opportunities for a business to do better in their Search strategy...

There are small problems like the Y-axis being different on the two slides. The more important issues are the fragmentation of the data, the overall intent being just to puke data out, and the rigor applied to where the stark focus should be in this story. It is also lacking the most important element: So What?

If you think hard about both the story you are trying to tell and the lessons you've learned related to effective data visualization strategies, you can transform the story into something massively simpler and uplevel it into something powerful...

Except for the end goal of driving big change to the business strategy, everything is different: Different framing, different visual, different data, punchy So What. Simple, effective, meaningful.

Don't ever let data get in the way of telling a story with data.

From my experience, I've created a set of 15 universal truths that will help you achieve a similarly transformative outcome in you #dataviz efforts. Here they are...

1. You are the presentation, not the slides.
2. Clipart is for adult earthlings with questionable taste (or young earthlings who don't know any better).
3. Let things upset you. It is how you make things better.
4. Don't puke all the data out at one.
5. The only acceptable Animation on a slide is Fade.
6. It's not the ink, it's the think.
7. Never force your audience to do the math. That's your job.
8. Anything that is going to come out of your mouth should not be on a slide.
9. Actual numbers make reality real a million times better than percentages.
10. Limit the number of stories you tell, don't limit the number of slides.
11. Data is just a means to an end. It can't be the end in of itself.
12. Never ever never never end your story with a buffet of purpose-deficient "ideas."
13. An Analyst is not a dispassionate participant.
14. Don't tell the audience things they already know.
15. Purposeful data wins. Does your data have a powerful answer to the question so what ?

Regardless of if you are in a HR, Tech, Corporate Security, Sales, or any other job function, you'll use these universal truths to tell better stories next time you see your boss, your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss (your client!).

If you are interested in topics like this one, I hope you'll sign up for my newsletter. Once a week I share an insight to improve your salary, from the intersection of marketing and analytics.

Carpe diem!