visual data storytelling is a powerful way to communicate data insights to your audiences. However, it’s essential to follow data storytelling best practices to ensure that your audience is able to understand and make sense of the data you are presenting.

For example, using too many visualizations can overwhelm your audience and lead to confusion. It is also important to choose the right visualizations for your story. For example, a bar chart works best for comparing two data sets over time and a pie chart is better suited for displaying a percentage of answers to a question. Furthermore, aggregating data points can help you avoid visual clutter and present data in a more digestible format.

The Art of Persuasion: Using Visual Data Storytelling in Business Presentations

Another important factor in effective data storytelling is reducing cognitive load, or the amount of information an audience is required to process. To reduce cognitive load, you should limit the number of visuals in your data story and focus on presenting only the most relevant ones to your audience.

This will allow your audience to more easily grasp the overall meaning of your data story and will prevent them from over-analyzing it. This is especially important for data stories that are presented to a large audience.

To mitigate this challenge, we developed a framework and prototype that allow users to customise the content of their visual data stories by editing the information units. By encoding these information units into different visual channels, audiences can create unique combinations that go beyond conventional narrative visualization models.