In Data Visualization: Your Secret Weapon in Storytelling and Persuasion, Adam Singer, Analytics Advocate at Google shares:
“In a world increasingly saturated with data and information, visualizations are a potent way to break through the clutter, tell your story, and persuade people to action.”
Statistics are good but showing your data in context of what makes it relevant with a simple chart or graph makes it that much easier to understand, tell your story and persuade your audience.
Edward Tufte, encourages the use of data-rich illustrations that presented all available data where every data point has a value, but when they are looked at more generally, only trends and patterns can be observed. You should be able to see your data trend at a glance and understand each data point in context.
Tufte also encourages us to avoid “chartjunk” – useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays like over styling and nonessential, gratuitous graphics.
A picture is worth a thousand words but a good infographic may be worth a thousand meetings. 🙂