Data visualization: the power to produce an engaging, insightful experience

Data visualization: not always the answer

As much as data visualization brings new insights and understanding to the non-data professionals, it is not always the only answer or the whole answer. The fact that visualization summarizes data and plots trends doesn’t mean that the insights are going to be obvious. “Sometimes people look at charts and just don’t know what they mean,” says Boris Evelson, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “A picture is not always worth a thousand words.” Static explanations are also not enough, because ?they would lose most of the meaning when users start slicing and dicing the data. That is where automated natural ?language generation (NLG) comes in—dynamically generated explanations of what the user is looking at, along with root cause analysis of key metrics and trends.

Individual differences also play a role in data visualization comprehension. Not every user is visual; some are more verbal or quantitative and do better with a narrative or with a numerical presentation such as a spreadsheet. Visualizers and verbalizers both strive to extract meaning and make connections based on data, but they look at different parts of the information; verbalizers tend to go to the irrelevant parts of pictures sooner than visualizers, so they may not be gaining as much understanding from the data.

Data storytelling combines the best of both worlds. Identifying the key points that can be derived from the data, putting them in visual form and developing an engaging narrative creates a more memorable and meaningful user experience than either one alone. Adding a commentary that includes quotes from experts and points out subtle differences in the visualized data enriches the user experience. Even a comparison between two relatively simple pie charts can benefit from such an elaboration by highlighting the most important ?messages. Otherwise, the user can end up looking ?back and forth, slice by slice, not sure what the main takeaway is.