In Search of the Next Best Data Story

Part 1: Context and Communication

In the past few days, I have felt a strong urge to improve myself, especially in terms of communication. I am aware of the progress I made, considering that in the past, I cannot deliver a speech publicly without sounding like I’m about to cry the entire time. During the past few presentations and meetings I have participated in, I have felt like I’m always defending myself. And it feels wrong.

“If you’re defending yourself, you’re already coming from the wrong place.”

There are three things I want to improve in terms of communication:

1. my vocal cadence — I often get super duper ultra excited whenever I speak or teach, so I tend to speak fast, but not everyone in the audience are on the same energy level as I am, so as a speaker, I have to be aware of that
2. voice projection — another result of my passion is my tendency to (borderline) shout at the audience. I have been asked many times after a (supposedly funny) speech, “Hey Shane, are you mad?” There are times when I should talk loudest, there are times when I should talk softly, etc and I also want to be aware of that
3. coherence — the ultimate result of my excitement when speaking is the tendency for me to talk about a bajillion topics and veer countless of times from the central theme of my speech. This is where the importance of outlines come in. I’m practicing the habit to always write an outline (bullet, enumerated list, etc) even when its just a 5 minute meeting so that I honor everyone’s time by being more prepared and coherent when I speak.

In this series of posts, I will be documenting my journey in creating The Best Data Viz Ever and in the process, my aim is to become a better data scientist, a better data storyteller, and a better communicator.

My main reference for data viz is Cole Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data.

Data Viz Mantra

So far, one of the best presentations I had was regarding the social tech startup I co-founded called KampAIan. All the slides are simple and the order follows the generic template for an elevator pitch.

1. Problem Statement

Issues with the Latest Anti-Rape technologies

2. Our solution

Main features of KampAIan

3. Demo

Demo of some pages on the app

4. Feedback from the client / customers

Testimonials or market validation

5. Call to Action

at this point, I told the audience what are the types of assistance or support my team needed most and how businesses or corporations can partner with us

With these 5 slides, our team was able to get offers amounting to more than half a million pesos to develop the first MVP and offers from various CEOs to provide us with an R&D team or a team of developers.

This pitch deck started with pieces of scratch paper. The reason for this is that I find it much faster to ideate on paper. It feels less discouraging to crumple a piece of paper and start over versus deleting a ppt on MS Powerpoint then starting from scratch.

Knaflic believes in the same thing.

post-it storyboarding

By the time we founded KampAIan, I wasn’t working as a Data Scientist yet. I was working as a co-inventor of a biomedical tech startup and my background was engineering and technopreneurship. So most of what the slides included were leaning to sales or business dev, as I wasn’t big on data yet at the time.

If I were to revise the slides, I would probably open with a slide with simple text. Perhaps the latest statistic on rape. Less text, more photos / diagrams / icons instead.

new storyboard — with comments

Here are the tools that I found useful (and free) in making better slides:

1. Canva — yeah, you can make diagrams on canva by using arrows, icons, shapes
2. Creately — for process flow diagrams, flow charts, etc
3. Flaticon — for free vector icons that look good
4. unsplash — free stock photography https://unsplash.com/
5. undraw — free open source illustrations https://undraw.co/
6. hislide — lots of free templates for presentations (just export the image to canva for the presentation if you use any) https://hislide.io/
7. mockup generator — make high fidelity mockups https://theapplaunchpad.com/mockup-generator/
8. charts factory — animated simple charts https://chartsfactory.com/
9. tableau- has a free 14 day trial if you don’t your dashboards/charts looking like microsoft products https://www.tableau.com/ (huge thanks to Tableau Educate for providing FTW Foundation scholars and instructors with Tableau licenses for the duration of the program!)
10. Flourish — for simple animated charts (don’t go too crazy with these) https://flourish.studio/
11. Overflow — pro userflow diagramming https://overflow.io/
12. Lottie — if anyone’s making an app that needs animation https://airbnb.design/lottie
13. Webgradients — open source library of gradients https://webgradients.com/
14. Coverr — free stock video https://coverr.co/
15. Pttrns — for when you need inspiration on how to design interface https://pttrns.com/

Going back to improving the KampAIan pitch deck, I have found this viz from RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network).

Although the viz does convey a lot of information, I think it could be improved by refraining from the use of donut charts. According to Cleveland and McGill’s paper on “Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data”, we as readers / audience are rather relatively poor at judging angles.

In fact, Knaflic dedicates a whole section to declare war on pie charts.

no true DS uses pie charts ;)

You might be wondering…. why the hate?

Go on google, search for examples of pie charts then come back to this section. Here’s why:

This is not The Waitress broadway musical, nobody wants that pie

So for the purposes of the pitch deck, I would display it this way:

simple text, most important detail placed on the top-left

A note from Knaflic on displaying simple text:

having numbers doesn’t mean you have to display a chart

I’ll be continuing with these blog series using different examples so stay tuned.

If you want to collaborate and work with us to get KampAIan going, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Stay tuned!