Planning your dataviz story. So, let's talk about how we develop that connective tissue between the information and the data we've collected and the objective that we're working against. This is our story. The story we know is a vital part of creating a successful visualization, and does just that. It really does become that connective tissue between our data and our goal. Now, organization is of utmost importance here. We need in the story we tell to be organized so that we can communicate effectively to our audience, and lead them through a narrative efficiently and effectively. To that end, I want to introduce you to Barbara Minto. Barbara Minto was a McKinsey consultant who developed a brilliant set of concepts that she called the Memento pyramid principal. This principal basically said that any statement that is made needs to be supported by facts, and the statement must be a perfect summarization of those facts. She had a couple of other rules. The first one is that, the most important that a statement we make must be a good summarization of the elements that we're using below it to support that statement. Those elements, the facts that we're using to support that statement must all be similar in some way, like a group, right? We want apples here. Not apples and oranges. Then the ordering of the facts as we display them should be something that is unsurprising to our audience. We either order them in time of occurrence from earliest to latest, from biggest to smallest, something that will make sense to them. Now, I use this term before but this is where the idea of MECE, mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive comes from. As Minto pushes us here, the facts that we are using on a single line should be MECE. They should be mutually exclusive from one another as well as collectively exhaustive. When we have that, we know we have a robust well-organized story. This is the way we should think about organizing the story we're telling, and not in a single pyramid, you can use as many as you want depending on how many chapters you have or points you have in your story. But this kind of organization can be very important. What it can also do is really lead us as we begin to plan for how we want to collect data and use data. In that way, if we don't have a statement yet or a set of facts, we can change that statement to an objective. That we state and we phrase that in terms of a statement, right? So, the objective that we talked about in the previous lesson becomes that objective that we're after. We don't have facts yet but we do have hypotheses, we do have key questions, so we can start to think about what those are and place those together. This will help us if we can articulate these questions correctly and ensure that this whole thing is MECE. It will help us develop a robust and solid story. Again, we will want to apply the same rules that we would to a finished statement and finished story to our planning process. This will point us in the right direction and move us toward the right story that we ultimately want to produce. Each of those key questions, the hypotheses that we develop, we want to support with some data. In this way then, we can develop a plan to go out and collect information, collect data to prove or disprove a hypothesis, answer the key question that we've developed, and then ultimately roll up to some statement, and these things all fit together nicely in a well organized story. That's complicated, so, let me try to show you an example. To do this, I want to introduce a company named Bellabeat. This is a real company but we're going to use them illustratively here. What Bellabeat produces is high-tech, very beautifully designed instruments primarily for women who are pregnant. What you're seeing here is the device called the shell, which allows a pregnant woman to hear her baby's heartbeat. It can also be turned around and send music to the child. They have a couple of other well-designed products as well. One on the left here called the leaf, which is an activity tracker that looks more like a piece of jewelry, it's a beautiful piece. Then on the right is something that's called balance, which is a Bluetooth enabled scale. All of these products are well-designed and incorporate great technology. But, most of them are not known for sure. So, Bellebeat, whether you're talking about leaf, balance, or shell are facing an awareness problem. Consumers particularly women carrying children do not know of their existence where these products would probably fit many of the needs that they want, they just don't know about it. So, we can construct based on that objective this design a Memento pyramid scheme. At the very top, we put that objective of building awareness, and we're doing this in the form of a statement, right? To increase sales which is the ultimate output and objective of Bellabeat. They first must grow awareness. So, there we have captured our goal, growing awareness in a statement. Now, underneath that, we start to look at some key questions that will help us determine the plan or the approach that Bellebeat should take to growing awareness. To ensure that we have a MECE set of questions, one of the things I like to do is to begin one question with the word what, the second with the word how, the third with the word why. If I can answer a what, how, and why question about the statement I've made, I know that I have a certainly a mutual exclusive set of questions that I'm after, but also a very robust and complete view of that statement. So, in this case, I will say what is the level of awareness for Bellabeat today? Certainly an important thing to know. I want to know how has the awareness for Bellebeat changed over time. I will want to know as why? Why is awareness critical to Bellabeat's product adoption. Just to prove out that, right? And then under each one, you can see I can articulate a data source that will help me answer that question. In this way, I have formed a visual outline for the communication journey that I'm about to set on using data that I know will answer a question, that I know will support an ultimate goal and objective. You can see how all of these things from story-wise would fit together very well. So, that Minto idea really does offer an excellent way for us to organize data stories. It ensures that the statements that we make are all supported by facts. It introduces this concept of mutual exclusivity and things being taken together collectively exhaustive, ensuring that we are communicating sound ideas. The guidelines provide excellent structure for any story, organized, clear, and concise. This will also ensure that the approach we take in collecting data and the analysis that we do will be sound, as this becomes the plan that we will begin with. Okay, in this module, we looked at a number of things. We took a look at this explosive growth of data. Really seeing that there is no better time than now to understand how to communicate effectively with data. We evaluated methods of accessing data. How do we get our hands on this analysts the data? What are the right paths and avenues? What are the wrong ones? We looked at an approach to focusing our communication journey through the use of a goal and an objective. Then, we looked through the Minto pyramid principle. This idea of how we can start to plan our data story, and layout in visual form a good outline. We used again the case study for Bellebeat to really illustrate those concepts. We will continue on with Bellebeat as we move forward in this class.
