Storyboarding Your Data Visualization for Maximum Impact

MX Bites / August 18, 2024

Over time, we’ve seen the impact of data visualization on clearing the pathway for solid decision-making in business. However, there’s a system that can visibly and magnanimously increase the impact of data visualization in business operations, and that system is known as storyboarding. It combines both strategies for data storytelling and data visualization into one system for effectiveness. Instead of having to choose between both techniques of data analytics, storyboarding combines both to give a more holistic perspective, as it involves planning and structuring your visualizations to create a coherent and impactful narrative. 

Let’s take you through a more in-depth understanding of storyboarding your data visualization and how it can help you achieve greater success in your business operations.

The Importance of Storyboarding in Data Visualization

Imagine how the system that powers films and animations works, in which each of the scenes is carefully mapped out before production begins. That’s how storyboarding also works. It consists of a series of data visualization boards that are used to tell a story. The following highlights the importance of storyboarding your data visualization:

• • It brings clarity. Normally, data visualization brings colour and life to data points. When now coupled with storytelling, it mobilizes the emotional mind to connect with the core of the narrative. This, in turn, brings enough clarity to take action.
  • Structures data flow: A typical data dashboard does not exactly indicate the flow of data; instead, one needs to structure meaning around it. The beauty of using storyboarding is that it narrates a story around the data points in a coherent way, such that you are able to understand the progression of the message that is being expressed through data.
  • Optimizing data communication for your audience: When data visualization is used alone, it is likely not to form any resonance with the audience, but when it is storyboarded, it moves your audience to take action because it resonates more deeply with them. Storyboarding allows you to tailor your visualizations and storytelling to ensure they resonate with your target audience.
  • Increased engagement from the audience: One of the factors that causes a lack of engagement in your target audience is a lack of understanding. Once they can resonate with the message that a storyboard passes across, they are spurred to respond positively to it.

Steps to Storyboarding your Data Visualization

Now that you’ve seen how important it is to communicate data points using storyboards, let’s consider a few steps on how to go about it:

1. 1. Clearly define your goals: Before communicating a message using a storyboard, you need to clearly define the purpose of the message, know your target audience, and understand what deeply resonates with them. Then you can carefully craft a story board that aligns with your goal and clearly communicates with your audience.
   2. Collect your data, analyse it, and arrange your narrative. Using either internal or external data collection methods, collect data from relevant sources, then analyze the data to form meaningful concepts, which would form the basis and foundation of your story. The analysis helps to decode the patterns and trends that give meaning to the data. After that, arrange the insights from the data to form a meaningful narrative. To effectively arrange your narrative, make it into an outline that includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. It helps to present your data in a logical sequence.
   3. Sketch your data visualization: Identify the key data points in your narrative and sketch a narrative that highlights them and conforms with the overall message you’re trying to pass across. The sketches could include labels, annotations, diagrams, and chats that roughly express the storyline.
   4. Arrange visualization sequentially: One of the beauties of sketching is that it helps you to roughly paint your ideas so that you can see the big picture. However, sketches are not usually perfect, hence the need to rearrange them sequentially to form a perfect storyline that your target audience can relate to.
   5. Refine and review: Critically check your storyboard to see if it’s clear enough for your users to understand and to confirm if it follows the right progression that resonates with them. In many cases, you might need to experiment with some of your users; ask a few of them to test it and ask for their feedback. Then, use the feedback to make necessary adjustments to the storyboard. 

Things you should do when creating a storyboard

Here are a few best practices you should not neglect when storyboarding your data visualization:

1. 1. Keep your target audience in mind
   2. Craft your story with brilliance and simplicity
   3. Be open to feedback and continuous improvement
   4. Use a sketch pad or a pen and paper to illustrate your ideas
   5. Engage data visualization and BI tools to create detailed visualizations.

Conclusion

It takes clear visuals and storytelling to communicate ideas to your stakeholders and influence them to make decisions. Storyboarding your data visualization is a great way to communicate your ideas, help your customers and business stakeholders emotionally connect to your ideas, and drive them to take action.