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Episode #24: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
147 Plays9 years ago
Welcome back to The PolicyViz Podcast! This week, I speak with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, who runs the Storytelling with Data blog and whose new book–Storytelling with Data–was just released. I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the book...
The post Episode #24: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the Policyviz podcast is brought to you by Juice Analytics. Juice is a company behind Juicebox, a new kind of platform for presenting data. Juicebox is a platform designed to deliver easy to read, interactive data applications and dashboards. It turns your valuable analysis into a story for everyday decision makers. For more information on Juicebox or to schedule a demo, visit juiceanalytics.com.
Meet Cole Nussbaum-Affleck and Her Journey
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I'm here with Cole Nussbauer-Naflick, author of a new book, Storytelling with Data, longtime blogger at the website of the same name. Cole, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you. Thanks for having me, John. Excited to be here. Yeah, excited to talk about this new book. I have a fresh new copy. It only came out like two days ago. It still has that new book smell.
00:00:58
Speaker
Nice. So maybe for those who don't know you, you can talk a little bit about yourself and then why don't you just jump in and tell us why you wrote the book, who you wrote it for, all those good GC details.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I like to think of what I do as telling stories with data, and I've done that throughout my career over the past decade and some change. A number of different organizations in a lot of different roles was at Google for a number of years on the People Analytics team there.
00:01:30
Speaker
And one of the areas I've always been drawn to is visualizing data as a way to increase understanding and help drive action. It's actually developed a course at Google on data visualization and taught that for a number of years around different offices and then started realizing that there's a need that expands beyond that.
00:01:52
Speaker
And so eventually left Google and have spent the past few years primarily teaching workshops for organizations and teams who want to become more effective when it comes to communicating with data. And what I came to recognize after working with hundreds of different teams at many different organizations is the skills needed in this area are universal. They're fundamental. They aren't limited to any
00:02:19
Speaker
specific role or any specific industry, rather pretty much anybody could use lessons and become more effective when it comes to communicating with data, both visualizing data effectively as well as telling a story with the data that they want to communicate.
How to Engage Audience with Data Visualization
00:02:37
Speaker
And so over time the lessons that I teach in my workshops have
00:02:40
Speaker
codified those and ended up turning them into a book which goes into a lot more depth in terms of examples and tips and insight into my personal data visualization and storytelling with data design thought process.
00:02:59
Speaker
Right, so it's a great book. You sort of walk through how to declutter your graphs, how to different types of graphs, how to focus people's attention. Do you have a sort of basic like top three, top five, top 10 things that people should consider when they're first?
00:03:20
Speaker
I get the sense of the book is sort of for that first time person or maybe sort of now sort of getting their feet wet. Is there like the top few things that people really need to keep in mind when they're making their visualizations?
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I'd say that the book for me goes beyond the getting your feet wet. I mean, it's written in a way that's meant to be accessible for anybody who needs to communicate with data, whether that's on a daily basis or on a less frequent basis. But for me, the lessons really are fundamental. And they apply whether you're just starting out visualizing data or if you've been doing it for 10 years. Because the lessons are really about thinking about your audience.
00:04:00
Speaker
And when we're communicating with data, everything we're doing is for that audience. A lot of the lessons are about keeping that audience in mind and designing with them in mind really to put yourself in a situation to be successful when it comes to communicating with data.
00:04:15
Speaker
So when it comes to specific lessons, I think the number one thing, you know, if I had to really scale it down to one or two, one would be being thoughtful and intentional when it comes to the use of color. I think for me,
00:04:32
Speaker
you know, seeing a lot of the examples from different organizations. That's one place where I think people don't really think about it too much. They think about, you know, they either don't think about color at all and let their tools choose their color for them, or they end up becoming these sort of
00:04:48
Speaker
colorful, you know, maybe pretty but not so effective visuals. For me using color sparingly and strategically is one of your most powerful tools for really directing your audience's attention where you want them to pay it. So one bit of low-hanging fruit when it comes to tips would be just be intentional and thoughtful when it comes to the use of color. I go into that in a lot of depth and talk about specific considerations when it comes to color in the book.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about color because you do spend a bunch of time talking about it and the examples in the book are great. You know, here's a terrible rainbow colored thing or a black and white thing. And look, if I just add, you know, if I just change this from black and white to gray and blue or from rainbow to shades of blue, you can really highlight the different things.
00:05:36
Speaker
And you also do what I find is a key with the with a lot of people that I work with is you make the point that you don't have to be a designer you don't have to be an MFA to think about design. So when you're working with people and as you're writing the book, what are the sort of thoughts and strategies people should take who are not designers who want to use color or some of these other design aspects but particularly color that they should be thinking of when they're making their visualizations.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to color specifically, one strategy that I'll often employ is to start by making everything gray. So you basically start by pushing everything to the background and then pick one or maybe two colors that you want to use. And when it comes to which colors you use, you want to think about things like what tone am I wanting to set with my data visualization or with the broader communication in which that data visualization sits.
00:06:31
Speaker
And how can you use color to reinforce that tone? Or are there brand colors that it makes sense to fold in? And then really only using color in those places where you want to draw attention or focus your audience's attention. I think when it comes to the field of design, there are
00:06:50
Speaker
a lot of concepts that we can borrow when it comes to designing for data visualization in particular. One of my favorite examples, and it's one that I talk about briefly in the book, is the OXO kitchen gadgets. These are things like vegetable peelers and garlic presses and spatulas.
00:07:08
Speaker
And if you lay them out on a counter, they're designed in such a way that makes you want to pick them up in the way that they're intended to be used. And we don't often give thought to things like that, right? Of actually how clever that is and how that really takes into account the needs of the user. And you want to think about how you can do something similar when it comes to visualizing data. So when it comes to visualizing data, we don't have tangible things we can do. It's all visual.
00:07:35
Speaker
So then you want to think about how can you leverage visual cues to make it really obvious to your audience how they should use that data, what they should look at, in what order, and so forth, and really keeping the audience or the user in mind and designing with them in mind.
00:07:53
Speaker
Right, right. The book also talks a lot about, in a couple of different places, it talks a lot about changing the approach that an organization may have towards visualization or individuals in an organization who want to change the way their group or organization approaches visualization.
Improving Organizational Data Presentation
00:08:13
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit about what organizations should or should not try when it comes to improving the way they present their data?
00:08:23
Speaker
Sure. I mean, I think broadly recognizing when there are good examples, whether it's within the company or external to the organization to say, here's an effective example of visualizing data or telling a story with data and really promoting that sort of culture and working to spread the word within. Certainly one way to signal importance to people at an organization is to provide
00:08:53
Speaker
ways for people to develop expertise, right? So inviting in external experts or building that competency within the organization through training or through focus in other ways on making it important.
00:09:09
Speaker
Interesting to me, because if you think of the entire analytical process, you typically start off with a question or hypothesis, then you go gather some data, then you clean the data, then you analyze the data. And at that point, it's really easy to just stick the data in a graph and call it done. But that graph is the only part of the entire process that your audience ever sees. So for me, that graph deserves at least as much attention as the rest of the process.
00:09:37
Speaker
And so I think organizations recognizing that and sort of promoting that idea and recognizing when good work is done can help change the culture when it comes to having folks feel like they have the freedom to spend time on this part of the process.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting. Data is becoming more and more important to more and more people, and obviously visualization follows along, and it's interesting to see how many organizations are struggling with how to change these cultures. And you make the point, I think, in the book of improving the training, improving the skill sets of people, sort of letting that bubble up.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah. And I think investing in internal experts can be a great way as well so that people who feel less skilled have somebody internally to whom they can turn for questions and feedback is a great way to sort of start grassroots efforts in this area. Right.
00:10:29
Speaker
Now the other part of the book that I found interesting was the discussion you have about reading in a Z pattern. So we start in sort of the top left. I presume, especially in English-speaking countries, cultures, you start in the top left, you sort of move along the title to the right, and then you sort of move down to the left and then along the bottom.
00:10:48
Speaker
So, you talk a lot about that and you actually tell a story in here about showing one of the graphs to your husband and how he didn't start, you know, in the same place where you did in the visualization, which is a great part. So, how do you think about creating a visualization where people may not start in the exact place where you start or where you expect them to start or maybe they don't, you know, maybe they're, for whatever reason, they're not reading in that Z pattern. How do you sort of manage this idea that people aren't starting or going in a pattern in which you might expect?
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the thing to keep in mind is that people will typically read in that Z pattern that you described starting at the top left and doing zigzagging Z's across the page or the screen when there aren't other visual cues present. And so you want to think about then if you are providing other visual cues, those are things like
00:11:35
Speaker
color and size, enclosure, you know, other things that draw attention so that they're, you know, they draw it away from that Z, then you want to make sure that that's drawing attention to the right spots. So in the particular example that you reference that I talk about, you know, that, hey, my husband didn't start there. I talk about how I start at the top left because that's where
00:11:57
Speaker
the title is and that's where the axis titles were and where the details of the graph were and sort of, you know, I know this stuff. So when I look at a graph, look at the details first so that I know what I'm reading by the time I get there and then proceed to sort of analyze the data visually versus he went right to the data
00:12:15
Speaker
but the data that he went to was the important part of the data because that's what was highlighted. I think that instance both ways work. The meta point is to be thoughtful about how your audience might look at your visual. There's an awesome way to test that, which is close your eyes and then just look at your visual and notice where your eyes go first. If you think that might change depending on the person, hand it to somebody else and have them do this exercise.
00:12:44
Speaker
because often times where your eyes land first or where your colleagues eyes land first, that's where your audience's eyes will land first as well. So you just want to make sure that's where you want it to be.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice and strategy that everyone should use when they're creating. Turn your back to it and turn back around and see where you're going. Okay, so we don't have a ton of time, but I want to hit maybe the biggest question I have or discussion point really, which is the whole ethos of the book, which is storytelling with data.
Incorporating Storytelling in Data Visualization
00:13:19
Speaker
Because as you are well aware, being one of the leaders in the field, this idea of stories and telling stories with Thedas kicks up a lot of emotions from people. And for me, you sort of motivate the chapter on storytelling with the story of Little Red Riding Hood. And so when I just said those four words, every listener just had a picture of a red cloak just appeared in everyone's mind.
00:13:45
Speaker
And I'm not sure that's the same. I get the same thing with telling stories with data. Well, so that's what you want to try to tap into, right? That immediate memory. So, and the pairing of the visual with the verbal. And I think if we can figure out a way to
00:14:06
Speaker
take stories like Red Riding Hood and apply those concepts when it comes to our data. It helps us to make that data, not just facts on a slide that are going to be forgotten, you know, the next hour or the next day, but something that can stick with our audience. So for me, that means... Go ahead, go ahead. I was just going to say for me,
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, the things that you can take from stories like Red Riding Hood are the fact that there's a plot and twists and an ending. And I think absolutely we can leverage those components when it comes to telling stories with data as well, right? Where your plot becomes the context for your audience, sort of setting the stage for what they need to know to be in the right frame of mind to take in what you're going to give them.
00:14:52
Speaker
And then the twists, what's interesting about the data and what it shows, right? How can you take them through, you know, whether it's a character's journey or a suite of characters and how that plays out over time or over another construct.
00:15:07
Speaker
And then the ending, which for me is usually about the call to action and sort of sending your audience off ready to act or ready to do something with this new understanding that you've created through the story that you've told with data.
00:15:23
Speaker
I see, so for me the challenge is, or my hang up maybe, is that when I'm told the story of, you know, Little Red Riding Hood, we'll just stick with that. If Little Red Riding Hood, I can picture her, I picture the wolf, I picture the woodsman, I picture the grandmother, like there's people involved. And, you know, someone says, tell a story with your financial data line chart thing.
00:15:48
Speaker
I'm not sure I can get that same emotional connection. I think then we have to think about how do you characterize, how can you characterize the components of that financial analysis in your example? Or if we think about a specific example, chapter eight of the book I go through,
00:16:06
Speaker
one example from start to finish leveraging all of the lessons discussed in the other chapters. In that case, the scenario is, you know, you're introducing a product into this competitive landscape and wanting to understand, you know, what does competitor pricing look like over time? What's influenced that? How should that influence how you price your product? And so I think in a scenario like that,
00:16:29
Speaker
the characters become these other products in the competitive market. And then you can turn that into a story. What happens over time? What's driving that? What are consumers doing? Why are they doing it? You can create points of tension and conflict and anticipation that help you to hold your audience's attention as you tell the story. You can introduce resolution with the introduction of your product and
00:16:56
Speaker
And you can play on a lot of those things that stories in the traditional sense of the word incorporate. I think there are also opportunities to introduce stories into some of those finer points, right? Like you're talking about competitor A,
00:17:12
Speaker
totally genericized it here, but maybe you have a story about a customer who went in to buy this product at a certain store. There might be actually a story within the broader story that you could tell that also leverages some of those concepts. The character is really each of the pieces of the graph of the visual.
00:17:34
Speaker
each thing has become a character so that you can try to get the audience or the reader the user whatever to connect um the way you would with the woodsman or the or the grandmother yeah that's a really interesting way a really interesting way to think of it it's one way to think of it yeah
00:17:49
Speaker
The other thing that I talk about with or recommend to people, especially when they're giving presentations, is to tell stories about themselves and not necessarily a story that is directly related to the research or the presentation. I mean, not so far afield, but it could be a story about why the person became interested or what they learned or something like that.
00:18:16
Speaker
Now, that may not apply when you're making a graph, but do you- No, it's such an interesting concept though, right? Because that is a way to connect with your audience, which makes them then more likely to listen to everything else they're going to say. And it's funny because storytelling seems to come so naturally to some people, and I was always in awe of that.
00:18:39
Speaker
And what I found, because that's one of the things personally that I've been working on, is how do I insert or weave in more stories when I'm delivering content or delivering workshops. And I find, for me personally, if you look behind the scenes, I gave a talk at Google yesterday and included some stories from Google on that. And I talked through those to myself sitting in my office out loud, like,
00:19:03
Speaker
10 or 20 times probably right to make it feel natural in the delivery. So just an example that even if it doesn't feel natural to you, you can get there with practice because it doesn't feel natural if you don't consider yourself a natural storyteller. I mean I spent years behind a computer working with numbers because that's what's comfortable for me.
00:19:26
Speaker
So getting up in front of an audience and telling stories is well outside of what I would consider my natural wheelhouse. But, you know, I do it. Yeah, so I hear this a lot. So people get nervous about, they don't really want to tell stories because they think they're giving some professional talk about something important and they don't want to sort of add their personal narrative or their personal piece to it or they think that adding that personal piece to it somehow. Personal narrative, yeah, is what people crave.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah. So do you have ideas about how people should think about generating those stories? I mean, you talk a lot about in the book about the different, in the storytelling chapter in particular, you talk about how to construct a story and how to think about outlining it and the different types of stories that you could tell. But do you have, what things do you talk about when you work with people about the sorts of stories that they can construct? Are there techniques or things that they should do
00:20:23
Speaker
that they might want to try specifically to sort of build those stories up to develop them as they work with the data. That would be an awesome place to spend time sort of thinking out and lining out because my process for that piece has never been so
00:20:40
Speaker
intentional, I don't think. Embedding stories is super intentional. That would never happen naturally for me, so I have to plan for that. But when it comes to actually identifying the stories, just for me personally, it's thinking back through what experiences do I have that might lend themselves to a lesson or oftentimes the stories that I tell will be about
00:21:01
Speaker
One time I was working for this organization that did X, Y, and Z, and here's what we can learn from this scenario. There's some stories of experience that you can draw on. You think about a time you saw something happen that worked out unexpectedly really well or something that didn't work well and what was learned from that.
Articulating Insights on Graphs
00:21:23
Speaker
are all sort of some techniques, but this is more empirical just from me doing this myself than any comprehensive list of what to look at. So I want to wrap up in a minute, but I want to sort of pivot a little bit on the storytelling because we've been talking a little bit about storytelling when you're in front of an audience, but you also do it in a couple of different ways in the case study section of the book, which is sort of one of the last chapters.
00:21:48
Speaker
where you take a graph and you break it up into multiple graphs so you can sort of say, you know, here's one version, you see this story, here's another version, you see this story. But I think, for my money, the golden graph in the book is towards the end, in the ninth chapter, where you take this sort of
00:22:08
Speaker
I don't know if it's a complicated stacked bar chart, but it's a stacked bar chart that goes out to 100% and you have, you know, sort of more or less three different highlighting colors and with each of those highlighting colors you add these boxes which have a little bit of text on it. Can you talk a little bit about that approach of sort of combining, you know, you have the graph but you're also using color and text and linking all those pieces together.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, so that's an interesting one. I had to... I remember you mentioned that and then I'm just now looking at the book to see which example you're talking about. Yeah, so this particular one...
00:22:44
Speaker
I think for me, you asked earlier about what's the low hanging food or what are some tips you find yourself giving a lot. And for me, and I talked about these at Google yesterday too, I think it comes down to two primarily. I mean, there are many more lessons than that. But if you do nothing else, doing these two things more consistently can really have a lot of impact. And one we talked about already, which is being intentional in your use of color.
00:23:07
Speaker
And the second is thinking about what do you want your audience to learn from this data? What do you want them to understand about it? And actually putting those things into words, not assuming that somebody else looking at the same graph is going to walk away with the same conclusion, right? So if there's something you need your audience to get out of the visual,
00:23:24
Speaker
It needs to be articulated either in your voiceover if it's a live presentation or like any example you're talking about figure nine point twenty on page 226 for anybody who's referencing the book of actually putting those words on the page. And so in the example that you see here.
00:23:42
Speaker
it's drawing attention to a couple specific points within the broader data and then having text that describes why you're drawing attention to those points. In this case I've tied the text to the data through similar use of color. So you get there a little bit with proximity but not exactly because of the way the data is ordered here because of the progression that we needed to go through with it on prior pages.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, so being thoughtful with use of color and really using text wisely. Now, this example in particular is too dense to put on the big screen, right? I wouldn't use this for a live presentation, but for the audience who wasn't there for the presentation or for the takeaway that you send around afterwards, or if it's sent around as a written report,
00:24:30
Speaker
not something that you're talking through live, really having those words on the graph directly becomes important. And the words in this case were... It really tells the whole, even though I'm not 100% on the storytelling boat per se, but it really does tell... You get all the content from this graph.
00:24:50
Speaker
You know, and were this to be, you know, on a blog post, right, you could easily take this entire graph because it has the whole thing with it and you could just share that graph and you get the whole story because you've linked the color, you've linked the text, you've really highlighted all the significant pieces for people.
00:25:10
Speaker
So I think that was, I think that was a gem. Going ahead again to thinking about how your audience is going to interact with it and making how you want them to interact with it really clear through some of those design choices and with the text right there on the graph.
Conclusion and Sponsor Reminder
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, great. Well, it's a great book. I'm sure it's going to be a best seller. If you haven't picked it up, it's Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaum and Affleck. It's on sale from Wiley. I'll put the link on the website. Cole, thanks for coming on the show. This has been a lot of fun.
00:25:41
Speaker
Thanks for having me, John. I love talking about this stuff, so happy to come back anytime. Great. Well, we'll have you back then. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I appreciate it. If you have questions or comments, please shoot me a note on Twitter or on the website at policyvis.com. Until next time, have a good one. Bye-bye.
00:26:13
Speaker
And again, thanks to our sponsor, Juice Analytics. For 10 years, Juice Analytics has been helping clients like Aetna, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Notre Dame University, and US News and World Report create beautiful, easy to understand visualizations. Be sure to learn more about Juicebox, a new kind of platform for presenting data at juiceanalytics.com. Also, check out their book, Data Fluency, available now on Amazon.