Business Intelligence and
Data Analytics
www.gsb.usm.my
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Business intelligence
A set of methodologies, processes,
architectures, and technologies that transform
raw data into meaningful and useful
information used to enable more effective
strategic, tactical, and operational insights and
decision-making.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Data analytics
• Data analytics is the process of collecting,
cleaning, inspecting, transforming, storing,
modeling, and querying data (along with
several other related tasks).
• Its goal is to produce insights that inform
decision-making—yes, in business—but in
other domains, too, such as the sciences,
government, or education.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Types of data analytics
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Business intelligence and data analytics
• Business intelligence’s primary purpose is to
support decision-making using actionable
insights obtained through data analytics.
• Data analytics’ primary purpose is to convert
and clean raw data into actionable insights, used
for many purposes, including BI.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Business intelligence and data
analytics
• Business intelligence is primarily used by
leadership teams and non-technical personnel,
such as chief executives, financial directors, or
chief information officers.
• Data analytics is usually the preserve of analysts,
data scientists, and computer programmers who
have a more technical focus.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Data visualization
• Data visualization is defined as a graphical
representation of data.
• In BI, or Business Intelligence, data visualization
is already a must have feature.
• With the emergence of Big Data, data
visualization is becoming even more critical to
help data citizens make sense of the millions of
data being generated everyday.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Data communication
• Facilitating and guiding the conversation around
how to approach and present data is a major
aspect of a data analyst role.
• The difficulty remains no matter how familiar
you are with a dataset.
• Effective communication makes the overall
process more efficient.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Communication
• Communication refers to the imparting or
exchanging of information by speaking, writing,
or using some other medium.
Gniod uoy era who!
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Wrong Communication
Wrong communication may result in;
• Misunderstanding
• Confusion
• Wrong decision-making
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Communication Issues
1) The technical problem
How accurately can the symbols of communication
be transmitted?
2) The semantic problem
How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey
the desired meaning?
3) The effectiveness problem
How effectively does the received meaning affect
conduct in the desired way?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
DATA Vs. INFORMATION
• Data refers to the raw facts that are collected
while information refers to processed data that
enables us to take decisions.
• When data is processed, organized, and
structured or presented in a given context so as
to make it useful, it is called information.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Data Communication?!
• In school, we learn a lot about language and
math.
• We learn how to put words together into
sentences.
• With math, we learn to make sense of numbers.
BUT
No one teaches us how to communicate
with numbers.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Better communication
1. Understand the context
2. Use the right data
3. Choose an appropriate visual display
4. Eliminate clutter
5. Focus attention where you want it
6. Think like a designer (Design for aesthetics)
7. Check the results
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Better communication
There are a few questions to ask when you check the results.
We’ll call this the “RUI”:
1) Reach
Did the audience even receive your message at all? Who did
and who didn’t?
2) Understanding
Did the audience interpret the data message in the way you
intended?
3) Impact
Did the audience react in the way you wanted them to react?
Asking these questions will help you hone your message and a
better data communication, and it also will show an appropriate
degree of respect to your audience.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Exploratory vs. Explanatory Analysis
• Exploratory analysis is what you do to
understand the data and figure out what might
be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to
others.
• When we’re at the point of communicating our
analysis to our audience, we really want to be in
the explanatory space, meaning you have a
specific thing you want to explain, a specific
story you want to tell.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Exploratory vs. Explanatory Analysis
• Too often, people make mistake and think it’s
OK to show exploratory analysis (simply
present the data, all 100 oysters) when they
should be showing explanatory (taking the time
to turn the data into information that can be
consumed by an audience: the two pearls).
It is an understandable mistake.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Explanatory Analysis
There are a few things to think about and be
extremely clear on before visualizing any data or
creating content. (Goal)
1) To whom are you communicating? (target
audience)
2) What do you want your audience to know?
(Intended meaning)
3) Why? What do you want them to do about it?
(desired effect)
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Elements of the goal
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Exploratory vs. Explanatory Analysis
• Too often, people make mistake and think it’s
OK to show exploratory analysis (simply
present the data, all 100 oysters) when they
should be showing explanatory (taking the time
to turn the data into information that can be
consumed by an audience: the two pearls).
It is an understandable mistake.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Who, what, and how
Let’s look at the context of who, what, and how in a
little more detail.
WHO
• Your audience
1. More specific = Successful Communication
2. Narrow your target audience and avoid general
audiences, such as
“internal and external stakeholders”
or
“anyone who might be interested”
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Who
• You
-The relationship that you have with your audience
and how you expect that they will perceive you.
-Do you have an established relationship? Or it’s
the first time you are communicating with them?
- Do they already trust you as an expert, or do you
need to work to establish credibility?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What
Action
- What do you need your audience to know or do?
- Relevancy of your communication with the audience.
- Do you think that the audience knows better than you?
This assumption is false.
- You are a subject matter expert.
- You need confidence to make specific observations
and recommendations based on their analysis.
- Encourage discussion or suggesting possible next
steps
- Gives your audience something to react to rather than
starting with a blank slate.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What
Mechanism
- What method of communication you use?
- It will affect to the amount of control and the
level of detail.
- Written doc or email
- Live presentation
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What
• live presentation
- You (the presenter) are in full control.
- Not all of the detail needs to be directly in the
communication.
Tips:
1- Don’t read all from slides.
2- Practice, practice, and more practice!
3- Write out speaking notes.
4- Practice what you want to say out loud to yourself.
5- Give a mock presentation to a friend or colleague.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What
• Written document or email
- You have less control.
- High level of detail is needed.
- Need to address more of the potential questions.
- Sparse or Dense
• Slideument to meet both
Once you start to generate contents;
- How much control you’ll have
- How your audience consumes the information
- The level of detail needed
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Communication Mechanism Continuum
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What
• Tone
What tone do you want your communication to
set?
- Are you celebrating a success?
- Is the topic lighthearted or serious?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
How
• After you know who your audience is and what
you need them to know or to do, we use data as a
supporting evidence.
• What data is available that will help make my
point?
• Ignore the no supporting data?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Quote
'If we have data, let's look at data. If all
we have are opinions, let's go with mine.’
CEO of Netscape
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Consulting for context
How about if someone (client, stakeholder, or
your boss) asked you to deliver a talk on a topic?
• What background information is relevant or
essential?
• Who is the audience or decision maker? What
do we know about them?
• What biases does our audience have that might
make them supportive of or resistant to our
message?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Consulting for context
• What data is available that would strengthen our
case? Is our audience familiar with this data, or
is it new?
• Where are the risks: what factors could weaken
our case, and do we need to proactively address
them?
• What would a successful outcome look like?
• If you only had a limited amount of time or a
single sentence to tell your audience what they
need to know, what would you say?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The 3‐minute story & Big Idea
• If you had only three minutes to tell your
audience what they need to know, what would
you say?
• So what?
Big Idea has three components:
1. It must articulate your unique point of view;
2. It must convey what’s at stake; and
3. It must be a complete sentence.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storyboarding
• The storyboard establishes a structure for your
communication.
• It is a visual outline of the content you plan to
create.
• To ensure the communication you craft is on
point.
• Establishing a structure early on will set you up
for success.
• Subject to change.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storyboarding
Advice
• Don’t start with presentation software.
• Resistant to do changes or eliminate contents
you created.
• Start your storyboarding with low tech (A plain
paper or Post-it sticker will do).
• Changes or elimination would be easier and
more acceptable on the content that you spend
less time!
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Example storyboard
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tell Story with a Single Number
• Our employees scored an 88 average on their ethics
assessments
• On average, our mathematics student achievement is
64%
• We served 123,000 clients last year
• Nine out of 10 consumers prefer our pizza over our
competitors’
• Only 27% of children in this key neighborhood had a
dental visit in the past year
• Chances of dying from a snake bite are just 1 in 50
million
• Median income in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was $52,045 in
2016, the most recent year for which data are available
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
When Visualization is Harmful
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Useful Visual Displays
Not all types of visual displays are effective!
It depends on the question you are trying to
answer or a specific insight you are trying to
communicate.
You should always ask yourself if your chosen
visual display type best conveys the message you
are trying to share and if it can be easily
understood by your audience.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
General Chart Categories
1- Relationships
- Scatterplot
- Bubble chart
Nurturing Business Sustainability
General Chart Categories
2- Comparison
- Bar Chart
- Line Chart
Nurturing Business Sustainability
General Chart Categories
3- Distributions
- Histograms
- Box Plot
Nurturing Business Sustainability
General Chart Categories
4- Compositions
- Pie Chart
- Stacked Bar Chart
- Stacked Area Chart
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Some useful Visuals
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Some useful Visuals
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Some useful Visuals
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Simple text
• Great way of communication if you have just a
number or two to present.
• If you have just a number or two, putting them
in a graph or table won't be an attractive way of
presentation!
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Simple text (Examples)
•
•
The fact that you have some numbers does not mean that you need a
graph!
Quite a lot of text and space are used for a grand total of two
numbers.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Simple text (Examples)
In this case, a simple sentence would suffice: 20% of children had a
traditional stay‐at‐home mom in 2012, compared to 41% in 1970.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Simple text (Examples)
• Do you want to show the difference?
• “The number of children having a traditional
stay‐at‐home mom decreased more than 20%
between 1970 and 2012.”
• I advise caution, however, any time you reduce
from multiple numbers down to a single one—
think about what context may be lost in doing so.
• When you have just a number or two that you want
to communicate: use the numbers directly.
• When you have more data that you want to show,
generally a table or graph is the way to go.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tables
• Tables interact with our verbal system,
which means that we read them.
• Is good with mix audience.
• If you need to communicate multiple
different units of measure, this is also
typically easier with a table than a graph.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tables in live presentations
• When you find yourself using a table in a
presentation or report, ask yourself: what is the
point you are trying to make?
• Highlighted table.
• Consider whether including the full table in
the appendix.
• Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a
good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose
their ears and attention to make your point
verbally.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Table Example
Data should stand out more than the structural components of the
table.
Make the borders grey or remove them to increase the legibility of
your table.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Avoid covering the main story
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Heatmap
• Showing the relationship between two factors.
• Highlight the cell to convey the relative
magnitude of the numbers.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs
• Graphs interact with our visual system, which is
faster at processing information.
• A well‐designed graph will typically get the
information across more quickly than a
well‐designed table.
• The most handful graphs; points, lines, bars, and
area.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Chart or graph?
“Chart” is the broader category, with
“Graphs” being one of the subtypes
(other chart types include maps and
diagram).
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Points
Scatterplot
• Scatterplots can be useful for showing the
relationship between two things.
• More frequently used in scientific fields.
• Though infrequent, there are use cases for
scatterplots in the business world as well.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Points
• Scatterplot
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Lines
• Line graphs are most commonly used to plot
continuous data.
• Because the points are physically connected via
the line, it implies a connection between the
points that may not make sense for categorical
data (a set of data that is sorted or divided into
different categories).
• Lines graph categories: the standard line graph
and the slopegraph.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Lines
Line graph
• The line graph can show a single series of data,
two series of data, or multiple series.
• Note that when you’re graphing time on the
horizontal x‐axis of a line graph, the data
plotted must be in consistent intervals.
• Can’t mix the intervals (for example: decades
and years or years and months).
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Lines
• Line graph
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs - Lines
Line graph
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs – Lines - Slopegraph
Slopegraph
• Slopegraphs can be useful when you have two
time periods or points of comparison and want
to quickly show relative increases and decreases
or differences across various categories between
the two data points.
• Slopegraphs can take a bit of patience.
• Choosing Slopegraphs is depends on your data.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs – Lines - Slopegraph
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Graphs – Lines - Slopegraph
• If many of the lines are overlapping, a slopegraph
may not work, though in some cases you can still
emphasize a single series at a time with success.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Bars
• Bar charts are easy for our eyes to read.
• Because of how our eyes compare the relative
end points of the bars, it is important that bar
charts always have a zero baseline.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Bars
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Pie charts are evil!
• If I asked you to make a simple observation—which
supplier is the largest based on this visual—what
would you say? Then what proportion?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Pie charts are evil!
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Pie charts are evil!
• What should you do instead?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Cognitive load
Every single element you add to that page or screen takes up
cognitive load on the part of your audience—in other words,
takes them brain power to process.
Cognitive load can be thought of as
the mental effort that’s required to
learn new information.
As designers of information, we want to be smart about how we
use our audience’s brain power.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Cognitive load
• Cognitive load: processing that takes up mental
resources but doesn’t help the audience understand
the information.
This is something we want to avoid
We need to perceived cognitive load
on the part of our audience:
how hard they believe they are going to have to
work to get the information out of your
communication.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Clutter
• Cover or fill (something) with an untidy
collection of things.
• These are visual elements that take up space but
don’t increase understanding.
• There is a simple reason we should aim to reduce
clutter: because it makes our visuals appear
more complicated than necessary.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Gestalt principles of visual perception
• When it comes to identifying which elements in
our visuals are signal (the information we want to
communicate) and which might be noise (clutter),
consider the Gestalt Principles of Visual
Perception.
• Proximity, similarity, enclosure, closure,
continuity, and connection.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Proximity
• We tend to think of objects that are physically close
together as belonging to part of a group.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Similarity
• Objects that are of similar color, shape, size, or
orientation are perceived as related or belonging to part
of a group.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Enclosure
• We think of objects that are physically enclosed together
as belonging to part of a group.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Closure
• The closure concept says that people like things to be
simple and to fit in the constructs that are already in our
heads.
We perceived as a circle
first and only after that as
individual elements
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Continuity
• The principle of continuity states that elements that are
arranged on a line or curve are perceived to be more
related than elements not on the line or curve.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Connection
• We tend to think of objects that are physically
connected as part of a group.
• The connective property isn’t typically stronger
than enclosure, but you can impact this
relationship through thickness and darkness of
lines.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Connection
One way that we frequently leverage the connection
principle is in line graphs, to help our eyes see order in
the data
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Example: identify & remove clutter
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Remove graph boarder
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Remove the grid lines
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Remove data markers
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Remove zero and diagonal text
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Apply principle of proximity
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Leverage similarity
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Before & After
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Lack of visual order
• When design is thoughtful, it fades into the
background so that your audience doesn’t even
notice it. When it’s not, however, your audience
feels the burden.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Lack of visual order
The content is exactly the same; only the placement and formatting of
elements have been modified.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Clear Contrast
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Clear Contrast
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Leverage the contrast strategically
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Creating clear contrast
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Creating clear contrast
Nurturing Business Sustainability
If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tips to avoid overcomplicating
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Avoid overcomplicating
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Avoid overcomplicating
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Remove clutters
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Using contrast strategically
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What is the story and where to focus
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What is the story and where to focus
Nurturing Business Sustainability
What is the story and where to focus
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling
Nurturing Business Sustainability
You see with your brain
• Light reflects from a stimulus, this gets captured by
our eyes. We don’t fully see with our eyes; there is
some processing that happens there, but mostly it is
what happens in our brain that we think of as visual
perception.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
A brief lesson on memory
There are three types of memory that are important to
understand as we design visual communications.
1. Iconic memory
2. Short‐term memory
3. Long‐term memory
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Iconic memory
• Iconic memory is super fast. It happens without
you consciously realizing it and is stimulate
when we look at the world around us.
• Information stays in your iconic memory for a
fraction of a second before it gets forwarded on
to your short‐term memory.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Short‐term memory
• Short‐term memory has limitations. Specifically,
people can keep about four chunks of visual
information in their short‐term memory at a given
time.
• A graph with ten different data series (color,
shapes, etc) will increase the cognitive load.
• Therefore, we run the risk of losing the audience
attention.
• With that, we lose our ability to communicate.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Long‐term memory
• When something leaves short‐term memory, it
either goes into oblivion and is likely lost forever
or is passed into long‐term memory.
• Long‐term memory is the aggregate of visual and
verbal memory.
• By combining the visual and verbal, we set
ourselves up for success when it comes to
triggering the formation of long‐term memories in
our audience.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes signal where to look
• Preattentive attributes are visual properties that
we notice without using conscious effort to do
so. Preattentive processes take place within 200ms
after exposure to a visual stimulus, and do not
require sequential search. There is no visual cues to
help you
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes
• Iconic memory and is tuned to preattentive
attributes.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes
• If we use preattentive attributes strategically, it can
help us enable our audience to see what we want
them to see before they even know they’re seeing
it!
• Preattentive attributes can be extremely useful for
doing two things: (1) drawing your audience’s
attention quickly to where you want them to look,
and (2) creating a visual hierarchy of information.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes
Look at the Fig 4.4, your eye is drawn to the one element within each
group that is different from the rest: you don’t have to look for it.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Count the fire trucks
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Position
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Color
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Color
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Added marks
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Color + Added marks
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Position + Color
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in text
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in text
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in text
• We can employ preattentive attributes to create
visual hierarchy in our communications.
• Preattentive attribute of color, a bright blue will
typically draw attention more than a muted blue.
• Both will draw more attention than a light grey.
• We can leverage this variance and use multiple
preattentive attributes together to make our
visuals scannable, by emphasizing some
components and de‐emphasizing others.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in text
Studies have shown that we have about 3–8 seconds with our
audience, during which time they decide whether to continue to look
at what we’ve put in front of them or direct their attention to
something else.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in graphs
• With only a graph and without other visual cues, you are left to
process all of the information.
• The visual in Figure 4.7 could be one you create during the
exploratory phase: when you’re looking at the data to understand what
might be interesting or noteworthy to communicate to someone else.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in graphs
• In explanatory analysis, thoughtful use of color
and text is one way we can focus the story.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Preattentive attributes in graphs
Using the same visual but with modified focus and text to lead our
audience from the macro to the micro parts of the story.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Important Preattentive attributes
• Size
If you’re showing multiple things that are of roughly equal
importance, size them similarly. Alternatively, if there is one
really important thing, leverage size to indicate that: make it
BIG!
• Color
Resist the urge to use color for the sake of being colorful;
instead, leverage color selectively as a strategic tool to
highlight the important parts of your visual.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Important Preattentive attributes
• Use color sparingly
For color to be effective, it must be used sparingly.
Too much variety prevents anything from standing
out.
When we use too many colors together, beyond
entering rainbow land, we lose their preattentive
value.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Important Preattentive attributes
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Learning by example
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Think like a designer
•Affordances
•Accessibility
•Aesthetics
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Affordances
• In the field of design, experts speak of objects having
“affordances.”
• These are aspects inherent to the design that make it
obvious how the product is to be used.
• For example, a knob affords turning, a button affords
pushing, and a cord affords pulling.
• OXO brand kitchen gadgets are designed in such a
way that there is really only one way to pick them
up—the correct way.
• OXO kitchen gadgets afford correct use, without
most users recognizing that this is due to thoughtful
design
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Concept of affordances
• We can leverage visual affordances to
indicate to our audience how to use and
interact with our visualizations.
(1) Highlight the important stuff,
(2) Eliminate distractions, and
(3) Create a clear hierarchy of information
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Highlight the important stuff
• In Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell,
Holden, and Butler, 2003), it is recommended
that at most 10% of the visual design be
highlighted.
• Bold, italics, and underlining: Use for titles,
labels, captions, and short word sequences to
differentiate elements.
• CASE and typeface: UPPERCASE text in short
word sequences is easily scanned, which can
work well when applied to titles, labels, and
keywords.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Highlight the important stuff
• Color is an effective highlighting technique
when used sparingly and generally in concert
with other highlighting techniques (for example,
bold).
• Inversing elements is effective at attracting
attention, but can add considerable noise to a
design so should be used sparingly.
•
Size is another way to attract attention and
signal importance.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Highlight the important stuff
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Highlight the important stuff
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Eliminate distractions
• When it comes to the perfection of design with
data visualization, the decision of what to cut or
de‐emphasize can be even more important than
what to include or highlight.
• To identify distractions, think about both clutter
and context.
• Context is what needs to be present for your
audience in order for what you want to
communicate to make sense.
• Use the right amount—not too much, not too little.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Eliminate distractions
Here are some specific considerations to help you
identify potential distractions:
• Not all data are equally important.
• When detail isn’t needed, summarize.
• Ask yourself: would eliminating this change
anything? No? Take it out!
• Push necessary, but non‐message‐impacting
items to the background. Use your knowledge of
preattentive attributes to de‐emphasize. Light grey works well for
this.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Eliminate distractions
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Eliminate distractions
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Create a clear visual hierarchy of information
• We can visually pull some items to the forefront
and push other elements to the background,
indicating to our audience the general order in
which they should process the information we are
communicating.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Create a clear visual hierarchy of information
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Accessibility
• The concept of accessibility says that designs
should be usable by people of diverse abilities.
• You might be an engineer, but it shouldn’t take
someone with an engineering degree to
understand your graph.
• Two specific strategies related to accessibility in
communicating with data:
(1) don’t overcomplicate and
(2) text is your friend.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Accessibility
Don’t overcomplicate
If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do.
• Make it legible: use a consistent, easy‐to‐read font
(consider both typeface and size).
• Keep it clean: make your data visualization
approachable by leveraging visual affordances.
• Use straightforward language: choose simple
language over complex, choose fewer words over more
words, define any specialized language with which your
audience may not be familiar, and spell out acronyms.
• Remove unnecessary complexity: when making a
choice between simple and complicated, favor simple.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Accessibility
Text is your friend
• Thoughtful use of text helps ensure that your
data visualization is accessible.
• Text plays a number of roles in communicating
with data:
use it to label, introduce, explain, reinforce,
highlight, recommend, and tell a story.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Aesthetics
• When it comes to communicating with data, is it
really necessary to “make it pretty?”
• People perceive more aesthetic designs as easier
to use than less aesthetic designs.
• If you aren’t confident in your ability to create
aesthetic design, look for examples of effective
data visualization to follow.
• When you see a graph that looks nice, save it and
build a collection of inspiring visuals.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Aesthetics
1. Be smart with color. The use of color should
always be an intentional decision; use color sparingly
and strategically to highlight the important parts of
your visual.
2. Pay attention to alignment. Organize elements on
the page to create clean vertical and horizontal lines
to establish a sense of unity and cohesion.
3. Leverage white space. Preserve margins; don’t
stretch your graphics to fill the space, or add things
simply because you have extra space.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Aesthetics
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Aesthetics
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Acceptance
There are a few strategies you can leverage for
gaining acceptance in the design of your data
visualization:
• Articulate the benefits of the new or different
approach.
• Show the side‐by‐side.
• Provide multiple options and seek input.
• Get a vocal member of your audience on board.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Model visual #1
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Model visual #2:
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Model visual #3
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Model visual #4
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Model visual #5
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The Magic of Story
• When you see a great play, watch a captivating
movie, or read a fantastic book, you’ve experienced
the magic of story
• A good story grabs your attention and takes you on
a journey.
• After finishing it—a day, a week, or even a month
later—you could easily describe it to a friend.
• We can leverage this powerful tool for our business
communications.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling and the written word
1. Find a subject you care about. It is genuine caring,
and not your games with language, which will be the
most compelling and seductive element in your style.
2. Do not ramble.
3. Keep it simple. Great masters wrote sentences which
were almost childlike when their subjects were most
profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. The longest word is three letters.
4. Have the guts to cut. If a sentence, no matter how
excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new
and useful way, scratch it out.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Storytelling and the written word
5. Sound like yourself. I myself find that I trust my own
writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when
I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is
what I am.
6. Say what you meant to say. If I broke all the rules of
punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them
to mean, and strung them together higgledy‐piggledy, I
would simply not be understood.
7. Pity the readers. Our audience requires us to be
sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to
simplify and clarify.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Constructing the story
• The beginning
- The first thing to do is introduce the plot,
building the context for your audience.
- We should involve our audience, piquing their
interest and answering the questions that are
likely on their mind:
1) Why should I pay attention?
2) What is in it for me?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Constructing the story
1. The setting: When and where does the story take place?
2. The main character: Who is driving the action? (This
should be framed in terms of your audience!)
3. The imbalance: Why is it necessary, what has changed?
4. The balance: What do you want to see happen?
5. The solution: How will you bring about the changes?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Constructing the story
• The middle
- Once you’ve set the stage, so to speak, the bulk of
your communication further develops “what could
be,” with the goal of convincing your audience of
the need for action.
- You’ll work to convince them why they should
accept the solution you are proposing or act in the
way you want them to.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Constructing the story
• The following are some ideas for content that
might make sense to include as you build out your
story and convince your audience to buy in:
1) Further develop the situation or problem by
covering relevant background.
2) Incorporate external context or comparison
points.
3) Give examples that illustrate the issue.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Constructing the story
4) Include data that demonstrates the problem.
5) Articulate what will happen if no action is taken or no
change is made.
6) Discuss potential options for addressing the problem.
7) Illustrate the benefits of your recommended solution.
8) Make it clear to your audience why they are in a unique
position to make a decision or drive action.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The end
• Finally, the story must have an end. End with a
call to action: make it totally clear to your
audience what you want them to do with the
new understanding or knowledge that you’ve
imparted to them.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The narrative structure
• Narrative has to be central to the communication
• These are words—written, spoken, or a
combination of the two—that tell the story in an
order that makes sense and convinces the audience
why it’s important or interesting and attention to it
should be paid.
• A strong narrative can overcome less‐than‐ideal
visuals.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Narrative flow: the order of your story
• Think about the order in which you want your audience to
experience your story.
• Are they a busy audience who will appreciate if you lead
with what you want from them?
• Or are they a new audience, with whom you need to
establish credibility?
• Do they care about your process or just want the answer?
• Is it a collaborative process through which you need their
input?
• Are you asking them to make a decision or take an action?
• How can you best convince them to act in the way you
want them to?
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The spoken and written narrative
• live presentation
- Your audience has the opportunity to both read
and hear what they need to know
- You can respond to questions and clarify as
needed.
- You must ensure what your audience needs to
read on a given slide or section isn’t so dense or
consuming that their attention.
- Your audience can act unpredictably.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
The spoken and written narrative
• Written report
- In the case when something will be sent around
without you there to explain it, it’s especially
important to make the “so what” of each slide or
section clear.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tactics to help ensure that your story is clear
• Horizontal logic
- Have an executive summary slide up front.
- This is a nice way of setting it up, so your audience
knows what to expect and then is taken through the detail
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tactics to help ensure that your story is clear
• Vertical logic
-
All information on a given slide is self‐Reinforcing.
The words reinforce the visual and vice versa.
There isn’t any unessential or unrelated information.
The decision on what to eliminate or push to an appendix
is as important (sometimes more so) as the decision on
what to retain
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tactics to help ensure that your story is clear
• Vertical logic
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Tactics to help ensure that your story is clear
• Reverse storyboarding
- Take the final communication, flip through it, and
write down the main point from each
Page.
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Software
• https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/analyti
cs-business-intelligence-platforms
• Tableau for Students
https://www.tableau.com/academic/students
Nurturing Business Sustainability
Books
• Knaflic, C. N. (2015). Storytelling with data: A
data visualization guide for business
professionals. John Wiley & Sons.
• Larson, B. (2020). Data Analysis with Microsoft
Power BI. McGrawHill.
• Ryan, L. (2018). Visual Data Storytelling with
Tableau. Pearson
Nurturing Business Sustainability