Communicating with Data Making Your Case With Data (Carl Allchin) (Z-Library)

Carl Allchin Communicating with Data Making Your Case with Data

Carl Allchin Communicating with Data Making Your Case with Data Boston Farnham Sebastopol TokyoBeijing

978-1-098-10185-5 [LSI] Communicating with Data by Carl Allchin Copyright © 2022 Carl Allchin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. Acquisitions Editor: Michelle Smith Development Editor: Sarah Grey Production Editor: Daniel Elfanbaum Copyeditor: Sharon Wilkey Proofreader: Piper Editorial Consulting, LLC Indexer: Judy McConville Interior Designer: David Futato Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Illustrator: Kate Dullea October 2021: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition 2021-10-01: First Release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781098101855 for release details. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Communicating with Data, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The views expressed in this work are those of the author, and do not represent the publisher’s views. While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.

Table of Contents Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part I. Communication and Data 1. Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 What Is Communication? 4 The Communication Process 4 Getting Through to Your Audience: Context and Noise 6 Don’t Forget About Memory 7 Why Visualize Data? 9 Pre-Attentive Attributes in Action 12 Unique Considerations 17 Summary 18 2. Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 What Is Data? 20 Key Features of Data 20 Rows and Columns 22 Data Types 24 How Is Data Created? 28 Where Is Data Created? 29 Should You Trust Your Data? 34 Data as a Resource 35 Files 36 Databases, Data Servers, and Lakes 39 Application Programming Interfaces 41 Data Security and Ethics 43 iii

Easy or Hard? The “Right” Data Structure 44 The Shape of Data 44 Cleaning Data 51 The “Right” Data 53 Requirement Gathering 56 Use of the Data 61 Summary 65 Part II. The Elements of Data Visualization 3. Visualizing Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Tables 72 How to Read Tables 72 How to Optimize Tables 76 When You Might Not Use Tables 78 Bar Charts 79 How to Read Bar Charts 79 How to Optimize Bar Charts 85 When You Might Not Want to Use Bar Charts 93 Line Charts 94 How to Read Line Charts 94 How to Optimize Line Charts 98 When You Might Not Use Line Charts 103 Summary 107 4. Visualizing Data Differently. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Chart Types: Scatterplots 109 How to Read Scatterplots 110 How to Optimize Scatterplots 123 When to Avoid Scatterplots 127 Chart Types: Maps 131 How to Read Maps 131 How to Optimize Maps 134 When to Avoid Maps 141 Chart Types: Part-to-Whole 144 How to Read Part-to-Whole Charts 145 When to Use Part-to-Whole Charts 150 When to Avoid Part-to-Whole Charts 153 Summary 156 iv | Table of Contents

5. Visual Elements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Color 160 Types of Color Palettes 160 Choosing the “Right” Color 166 Avoiding Unnecessary Use of Color: Double Encoding 168 Size and Shape 172 Themed Charts 174 Size and Shape Challenges 175 Multiple Axes 179 Reference Lines/Bands 183 Reference Lines 184 Reference Bands 187 Totals/Summaries 190 Totals in Tables 190 Totals in Charts 193 Summary 194 6. Visual Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Titles 196 Main Title 196 Subtitles, Standfirsts, and Chart Titles 199 Text and Annotations 201 Annotations 201 Text Boxes 202 Text Formatting 203 Contextual Numbers 205 Legends 208 Shape Legends 208 Color Legends 210 Size Legends 212 Iconography and Visual Cues 213 Thematic Iconography 213 Audience Guidance 214 Background and Positioning 216 The Z Pattern 217 Whitespace 218 Interactivity 220 Tooltips 220 Interactions 223 Summary 225 Table of Contents | v

7. The Medium for the Message: Complex and Interactive Data Communication. . . . . 227 Explanatory Communications 227 Gathering Requirements 228 Updating Data in Explanatory Views 229 So What? 229 Exploratory Communications 230 Gathering Requirements 231 Flexibility and Flow 231 Methods: Dashboards 234 Monitoring Conditions 234 Facilitating Understanding 235 Methods: Infographics 238 Methods: Slide Presentations 240 Methods: Notes and Emails 242 Summary 243 Part III. Deploying Data Communication in the Workplace 8. Implementation Strategies for Your Workplace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Tables Versus Pretty Pictures 252 Data Culture 253 Data Literacy 256 Improving the Visualization Mix 257 Static Versus Interactive 261 Let’s Talk About PowerPoint 262 More Than Just PowerPoint 263 Interactive User Experience 265 Centralized Versus Decentralized Data Teams 268 The Data Team 268 Data Sources 269 Reporting 270 Pooling Data Expertise 272 Self-Service 273 Live Versus Extracted Data 274 Live Data 274 Extracted Data Sets 276 Standardization Versus Innovation 278 Importance of Standardization 278 Importance of Innovation 280 Reporting Versus Analytics 281 Reporting: Mass Production 281 vi | Table of Contents

Analytics: Flexibility but Uncertainty 283 Finding the “Perfect” Balance 285 Summary 286 9. Tailoring Your Work to Specific Departments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 The Executive Team 288 Finance 292 Human Resources 294 Operations 296 Marketing 299 Sales 301 Information Technology 304 Summary 306 10. Next Steps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Step 1: Get Inspired 309 Step 2: Practice 310 Step 3: Keep Reading 310 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Table of Contents | vii

Preface Communicating with data is a critical 21st-century skill. The demand for data skills from everyone in an organization has grown in the last decade compared to the initial need, which was for more data specialists. When you can use data to communicate, you can influence others’ decisions and achieve your organization’s goals. That’s the first aim of this book: to show you how to understand, visualize, and present data clearly and effectively. Thus, this book will answer questions like these: • What is communication, and how can you avoid noise interfering with your message? • What is data, and where can you get hold of this precious resource? • How can you visualize data? • How can you make your data visualizations clearer and more effective? My second goal in this book is to take you a couple of steps past that, so you can avoid some common pitfalls and conflicts that can arise when you use data in your business communications. My aim is to save you time and pain and help you ensure that your audience stays focused on your message. This book will also, therefore, answer questions like these: • What aspects of data visualization conflict, and how can you balance them? • What kind of context and presentation should you give your data visualizations? • What sorts of communication challenges tend to arise in organizational depart‐ ments (such as IT, HR, or marketing), and how can you overcome them? • What should you think about when communicating with data in various formats, such as presentations or email? ix

The split of these objectives is to allow you to not just become familiar with the skills involved in communicating with data but to be able to use those skills in the organi‐ zations you operate in. As you become more skillful at communicating with data, you’ll find that you are influencing those around you in a more powerful way than you could ever do with words alone. Why I Wrote This Book At my very first job in a large organization, I was assigned to a team that was prepar‐ ing slide decks to report on the organization’s operational performance and influence their peers and bosses. I was 22 and had never worked in an organization of more than 100 people. This company had over 40,000 people and operated in a completely alien manner to me. I sat next to the operational directors, so I had a good vantage point to see how the team worked. We compiled tables of numbers, insight, and com‐ mentary from other people’s work with data to measure progress toward operational targets, determine future strategies, and analyze where previous decisions had gone awry. We worked with aggregated data points from reports and charts used to run the vari‐ ous parts of the organization. These reports were formed from other people’s work with data. I hated not being able to get to the raw ingredients of these compilations: the data. What frustrated me even more was that I didn’t have the data skills to see that rawer data. I wanted to learn. So when asked about my next career move, I chose to follow the data and information back to its source and asked to work with the cen‐ tralized data team. I haven’t looked back since. I haven’t stopped working with data, so I’ve seen firsthand that the growth of data’s influence on organizations hasn’t stopped either. In fact, it’s only sped up. Data now influences business decisions and economies in ways that are often too complex to fully wrap our arms around. Harnessing data has become an important part of organ‐ izational life across all industries and sectors. Data used to be the domain of special‐ ists, but individuals across the organization are now being asked to communicate with data—whether you are a project manager, process improvement specialist, or team manager. Skilled data professionals are thus in high demand, but our numbers haven’t grown quickly enough to keep up with rapidly amassing data resources. Data work has tradi‐ tionally been a centralized, specialist function, since it often requires coding in spe‐ cialist languages or working with complex data reporting tools, but not anymore. Over 15 years of working with data, those tools have changed more than any other aspect of the job. The new generation of data tools is far easier to use, with improved user interfaces and far less coding, greatly reducing the barriers to entering the field. More people are using data more directly than ever before. x | Preface

This is especially true when it comes to data visualization. Tools like Tableau and Power BI from Microsoft have allowed subject-matter experts in all sorts of fields to showcase and share their findings through data. If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place. Learning to use these tools still requires training and support, both in using the tools themselves and in the fundamentals of data visualization. This book focuses on the latter. It is not a step-by-step guide to using any specific tool, but you might do well to read it in combination with such a guide. This book operates on a somewhat higher level, helping you understand basic data skills as well as how, when, and where to deploy them in your work life to get results. My specialty lies inTableau, so if you want to learn how to prepare your data for Tableau, I recommend my first book, Tableau Prep: Up & Running (O’Reilly). Alterna‐ tively, if you want to visualize your data, I recommend Practical Tableau by Ryan Sleeper (O’Reilly) as a great starting point. There are many, many books on working with, analyzing, and visualizing data. So why write another? Well, while Communicating with Data does cover those topics, it also takes you fur‐ ther into the working world. It will help you anticipate, plan for, and overcome many of the common challenges that arise when you begin communicating with data in organizations—from understanding the needs of different parts of the organization to making sure your audience actually views the communications you will make. This book aims to prepare you for what might arise and how to continue to deliver clear communications. Who Is This Book For? In a recent Accenture survey, only 21% of employees felt comfortable with their own ability to read, understand, and work with data. This book is primarily for the other 79%. No matter what your job, you need the skills to communicate with and influence those around you. In another study, it was found that 84% of employers believed that communication and collaboration were important skills for graduating students. In response to the same question, data skills/literacy was recognized by 66% of employ‐ ers as important. At school, you probably learned how to write and speak clearly but not how to work with data. This book looks to fill that gap. If you’re part of the 21% who have picked up enough data skills for you to work com‐ fortably with data, this book should still be useful for you. Fundamental data commu‐ nication principles are often missing in lots of the data communications I see, so this book will be useful to address any knowledge gaps you might have on the technical use of data. Soft skills also play an important part when communicating with data. In particular, you may find much helpful knowledge in the chapters dealing with situa‐ tional challenges—that is, working with different people and departments. Preface | xi

Communicating with Data focuses on building your working knowledge of the termi‐ nology and foundational concepts required for working with data and using data vis‐ ualization to communicate. These are the skills that can help you to be more effective in your communication, beyond language. To make use of this book, you don’t need to have any prerequisite skills beyond basic numeracy. What I’d like you to bring to this book is your expertise, your experience, and your questions so that you are thinking critically about what you read. By doing this, you will be able to use what you learn here to solve the unique challenges of your own workplace. When you understand what is possible and what you can do with data, you can pose the right questions and answer them faster. Being able to quickly mix your subject- matter expertise with data is what will give you and your organization a competitive advantage. Creating clear, insightful visualizations can help you find your answers and share them with others at all levels of your organization. Humans are great at spotting pat‐ terns in visual images but less so at analyzing data line by line. As you learn to create visualizations from your data resources, you will be able to communicate the trends and insights hidden within much more effectively. You’ll be able to show what is truly happening in the data so that your audience can draw their own conclusions. Using data visualization to influence change is a powerful technique. How the Book Is Organized In my daily work, I teach people what data is, how to create influential data visualiza‐ tions, and how to use them effectively. I’ve organized this book similarly to the way I organize my courses: we’ll start out with important background information, dive into the specifics of working with data, begin working with visualizations, and then finish with a look at the social and organizational challenges of communicating with data in large organizations. The book is divided into three parts: Part I, Communication and Data Chapter 1 starts with an in-depth look at what communication actually is and how communicating with data has changed over time. Chapter 2 dives into all things data: what it is, where it comes from, how to store it, how to prepare it for analysis, and how to gather the requirements for data work. This section lays the foundation for the skills you’ll learn in the rest of the book. Part II, The Elements of Data Visualization This section begins with Chapters 3 and 4, introducing you to a key facet of data visualization: the most important chart types you are likely to come across in your day-to-day working life and the best practices associated with them. You will develop a sense of how to choose which chart best delivers what you need. xii | Preface

Chapter 5 dives deep into the elements of a single visualization to show you how it all fits together. Chapter 6 takes you beyond the chart itself to look at other aspects that can help give additional context to your audience. The section con‐ cludes with Chapter 7, which explores how data visualizations work in various formats and methods of communication: the products you’ll use to deliver your data insights. Part III, Deploying Data Communication in the Workplace The final section deals with how to deliver your findings in the setting of your specific workplace. It’s common for data skills and their use to develop unevenly: some organizations use data better than others, and some departments within an organization will have stronger data skills than other departments. This uneven‐ ness will affect your communications: for example, how much does your audi‐ ence trust your data? You’ll need to tailor your approach accordingly. The first chapter of this section, Chapter 8, looks at how to find that balance. Chapter 9 concludes the book with a deep dive into several departments within a hypotheti‐ cal corporation, illustrating the challenges that are unique to those departments and how to get past them. My goal is to teach you the fundamentals of communication and data so that you can come away from this book able to visualize data, traverse organizational complexity, and influence others through communicating with data. Conventions Used in This Book The following typographical conventions are used in this book: Italic Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions. Constant width Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program ele‐ ments such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords. Constant width bold Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user. Preface | xiii

This element signifies a tip or suggestion. This element signifies a general note. This element indicates a warning or caution. O’Reilly Online Learning For more than 40 years, O’Reilly Media has provided technol‐ ogy and business training, knowledge, and insight to help companies succeed. Our unique network of experts and innovators share their knowledge and expertise through books, articles, and our online learning platform. O’Reilly’s online learning platform gives you on-demand access to live training courses, in-depth learning paths, interactive coding environments, and a vast collection of text and video from O’Reilly and 200+ other publishers. For more information, visit http://oreilly.com. How to Contact Us Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North Sebastopol, CA 95472 800-998-9938 (in the United States or Canada) 707-829-0515 (international or local) 707-829-0104 (fax) xiv | Preface

We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at https://oreil.ly/communicating-with-data. Email bookquestions@oreilly.com to comment or ask technical questions about this book. For news and information about our books and courses, visit http://oreilly.com. Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly. Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia. Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia. Acknowledgments When writing my first book, I learned how much support is needed from others, and this book has been no exception. Communicating with Data would not be the same quality as you read today without the considerable efforts from numerous people. The content of this book has been shaped since day one by Sarah Grey, a fantastic development editor who added a lot of color to the characters you will find in many of the chapters. Hopefully, you will relate to these characters as much as I do and that they will help you relate to the technical details you will find throughout the book. My production editor, Daniel Elfanbaum, assisted me on my first book and took on the challenge of delivering this second one. Thank you both and the rest of the team at O’Reilly. The technical review team members have all added their own perspectives and knowledge on the subject and made the text much richer than when they first read the initial drafts. Chris Love, Ryan Sleeper, Claire Reid, Jenny Martin, and Richard Silvester deserve a huge amount of thanks and credit, so please give them a high five in thanks if you ever cross paths. An extra big thank-you goes to Jenny Martin, along with our fellow Data Prepper, Tom Prowse, for keeping our community-building challenges, Preppin’ Data, alive when I’ve had to bury myself in writing and editing. If you want to learn how to pre‐ pare data, the Preppin’ Data website offers more than 50 free how-to articles along with more than 125 challenges to test your new skills. We genuinely just want people to feel the benefit of feeling comfortable with working with data. My final thank-you goes to my support network at home. I took on this book—like millions of people across the world—as I was sitting at home during COVID-19 and didn’t want to waste that time. Little did I know how mentally challenging that period would be. My parents, Janet and Trevor Allchin, have been encouraging throughout. My partner, Toni Feather, deserves the biggest thank-you of all, as she provided day- to-day support but also the biggest motivation to get the book done by its deadline. Preface | xv

We are currently expecting our first child, who just happens to be due at the same time as the deadline for this book. If you are reading this, the book will have narrowly been completed before the little one arrived. I hope that by reading this book you will be more prepared for communicating with data than I currently feel like I am for parenthood. xvi | Preface

PART I Communication and Data