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storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals storytelling with data storytelling with data a data visualization guide for business professionals cole nussbaumer knaflic Cover image: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic Cover design: Wiley Copyright © 2015 by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: ISBN 9781119002253 (Paperback) ISBN 9781119002260 (ePDF) ISBN 9781119002062 (ePub) Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 http://www.copyright.com http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions http://booksupport.wiley.com http://www.wiley.com To Randolph vii contents foreword ix acknowledgments xi about the author xiii introduction 1 chapter 1 the importance of context 19 chapter 2 choosing an effective visual 35 chapter 3 clutter is your enemy! 71 chapter 4 focus your audience’s attention 99 chapter 5 think like a designer 127 chapter 6 dissecting model visuals 151 chapter 7 lessons in storytelling 165 chapter 8 pulling it all together 187 chapter 9 case studies 207 chapter 10 final thoughts 241 bibliography 257 index 261 ix foreword “Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” —Edward Tufte, Yale Professor Emeritus1 We’ve all been victims of bad slideware. Hit‐and‐run presentations that leave us staggering from a maelstrom of fonts, colors, bullets, and highlights. Infographics that fail to be informative and are only graphic in the same sense that violence can be graphic. Charts and tables in the press that mislead and confuse. It’s too easy today to generate tables, charts, graphs. I can imagine some old‐timer (maybe it’s me?) harrumphing over my shoulder that in his day they’d do illustrations by hand, which meant you had to think before committing pen to paper. Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter down to the most important bits. Enter Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. I met Cole in late 2007. I’d been recruited by Google the year before to create the “People Operations” team, responsible for finding, keep- ing, and delighting the folks at Google. Shortly after joining I decided 1 Tufte, Edward R. ‘PowerPoint Is Evil.’ Wired Magazine, www.wired.com/wired/ archive/11.09/ppt2.html, September 2003. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html x foreword we needed a People Analytics team, with a mandate to make sure we innovated as much on the people side as we did on the product side. Cole became an early and critical member of that team, acting as a conduit between the Analytics team and other parts of Google. Cole always had a knack for clarity. She was given some of our messiest messages—such as what exactly makes one manager great and another crummy—and distilled them into crisp, pleasing imagery that told an irrefutable story. Her messages of “don’t be a data fashion victim” (i.e., lose the fancy clipart, graphics and fonts—focus on the message) and “simple beats sexy” (i.e., the point is to clearly tell a story, not to make a pretty chart) were powerful guides. We put Cole on the road, teaching her own data visualization course over 50 times in the ensuing six years, before she decided to strike out on her own on a self‐proclaimed mission to “rid the world of bad PowerPoint slides.” And if you think that’s not a big issue, a Google search of “powerpoint kills” returns almost half a million hits! In Storytelling with Data, Cole has created an of‐the‐moment complement to the work of data visualization pioneers like Edward Tufte. She’s worked at and with some of the most data‐driven organizations on the planet as well as some of the most mission‐driven, data‐free institutions. In both cases, she’s helped sharpen their messages, and their thinking. She’s written a fun, accessible, and eminently practical guide to extracting the signal from the noise, and for making all of us better at getting our voices heard. And that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Laszlo Bock SVP of People Operations, Google, Inc. and author of Work Rules! May 2015 xi acknowledgments My timeline of thanks Thank you to… 2015 1980 2010−CURRENT My family, for your love and support. To my love, my husband, Randy, for being my #1 cheerleader through it all; I love you, darling. To my beautiful sons, Avery and Dorian, for reprioritizing my life and bringing much joy to my world. 2010−CURRENT My clients, for taking part in my effort to rid the world of ineffective graphs and inviting me to share my work with their teams and organizations through workshops and other projects. Thank you also to everyone who helped make this book possible. I value every bit of input and help along the way. In addition to the people listed above, thanks to Bill Falloon, Meg Freeborn, Vincent Nordhaus, Robin Factor, Mark Bergeron, Mike Henton, Chris Wallace, Nick Wehrkamp, Mike Freeland, Melissa Connors, Heather Dunphy, Sharon Polese, Andrea Price, Laura Gachko, David Pugh, Marika Rohn, Robert Kosara, Andy Kriebel, John Kania, Eleanor Bell, Alberto Cairo, Nancy Duarte, Michael Eskin, Kathrin Stengel, and Zaira Basanez. 2007−2012 The Google Years. Laszlo Bock, Prasad Setty, Brian Ong, Neal Patel, Tina Malm, Jennifer Kurkoski, David Hoffman, Danny Cohen, and Natalie Johnson, for giving me the opportunity and autonomy to research, build, and teach content on effective data visualization, for subjecting your work to my often critical eye, and for general support and inspiration. 2002−2007 The Banking Years. Mark Hillis and Alan Newstead, for recognizing and encouraging excellence in visual design as I first started to discover and hone my data viz skills (in sometimes painful ways, like the fraud management spider graph!). 1987−CURRENT My brother, for reminding me of the importance of balance in life. 1980−CURRENT My dad, for your design eye and attention to detail. 1980−2011 My mother, the single biggest influence on my life; I miss you, Mom. xiii about the author Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells stories with data. She specializes in the effective display of quantitative information and writes the pop- ular blog storytellingwithdata.com. Her well‐regarded workshops and presentations are highly sought after by data‐minded individu- als, companies, and philanthropic organizations all over the world. Her unique talent was honed over the past decade through analyti- cal roles in banking, private equity, and most recently as a manager on the Google People Analytics team. At Google, she used a data‐ driven approach to inform innovative people programs and man- agement practices, ensuring that Google attracted, developed, and retained great talent and that the organization was best aligned to meet business needs. Cole traveled to Google offices throughout the United States and Europe to teach the course she developed on data visualization. She has also acted as an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she taught Introduction to Information Visualization. Cole has a BS in Applied Math and an MBA, both from the University of Washington. When she isn’t ridding the world of ineffective graphs one pie at a time, she is baking them, traveling, and embarking on adventures with her husband and two young sons in San Francisco. 1 introduction Bad graphs are everywhere I encounter a lot of less‐than‐stellar visuals in my work (and in my life—once you get a discerning eye for this stuff, it’s hard to turn it off). Nobody sets out to make a bad graph. But it happens. Again and again. At every company throughout all industries and by all types of people. It happens in the media. It happens in places where you would expect people to know better. Why is that? Figure 0.1 A sampling of ineffective graphs 16% 9% 7% 10% 10% 15% 10% 18% 10% 17% 32% 20% 15% 11% US Population Our Customers Our Customers Segment 7 Segment 6 Segment 5 Segment 4 Segment 3 Segment 2 Segment 1 (1.50) (1.00) (0.50) 0.00 0.50 1.00