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Storytelling — a simple trick to grab the user attention

4 min readOct 4, 2021

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#19: The one about Storytelling

Saying that picture is worth a thousand words is like saying nothing. But unfortunately the data doesn’t speak for itself. Our design choices do.

No matter how nice your data viz is, without the story, it tells nothing.

Example of such work is Commuting to work by Martha Kang McGill. It’s a nicely looking visualization but is missing the story. We don’t know why we are looking at it nor why should we care. It’s something one would hang on a wall rather than look for an insight. And let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with that. But based on the chart format, I don’t think that was the design purpose.

Ornament data visualization that is lacking storytelling.
Work by Martha Kang McGill

Good data visualization solutions✔️

Elements that work in this chart

Limited data points

Despite how beautiful this data viz might appear, I had a hard time finding good design choices. After the artsy first impression, you will notice that there is…

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Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Written by Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Data Visualization Designer | Trainer | Sociologist. Check my redesigned charts in weekly Incremental Improvements articles.

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