Presenting Dataviz is with Impact. We come to the final step in our communication journey. We have done all the data collection and we've identified our objective, we've stitched together our story, we have patterns that we found in our visualizations and we put all sorts of polish on them so that they are client ready. The last bit now is for us to stand on our feet and present that visualization out and communicate it effectively to our audience. There is a process that can help it's here, something that I call the McCandless method, named after David McCandless and the way he's presented his data visualization. There are five easy steps to this. The first step is introducing the graphic by name, giving it a story that has one, allowing your audience to focus on that graphic as the point of their attention rather than you. Second step, is to explain the graphic by answering the questions, your audience will have. Take the questions that will immediately pop into their mind, right off the table, address them proactively. You gain a lot of perspective as you present the visual more and more you'll see what kind of questions pop up and sure that those are the questions that you address immediately proactively. The third step is stating the insight from your graphic. Give the story away, tell them what they will feel or what they will see, before you provide this substantiation. Giving that up front, then sets your audience in a mode of substantiating, looking to support the work that you're doing. You do that next by giving examples. I for the longest time, I had those two steps reversed. I would build this great story through my insights and my facts and then gave the great reveal, what I hadn't realized that I had lost much of my audience, along that story. Reverse those two. Give your insight first, then provide the substantiation. Finally, you can bring this graphic home by telling them why it's important, why it matters to them, making it much more personal for for your audience. You can see this demonstrated time and time again, by David McCandless. I think the best illustration that I saw was from a Ted talk of his where, he was presenting what he calls the billion clicker Graham, a visual that we've used a couple times or a concept in this in this course. Here's the way, McCandless did that. This is the actual narrative that he used in presenting that visual and you can see clearly each of these steps utilized effectively. He begins by giving the graphic the name, now the audience understands what it is, it has some kind of association with the graph and now their attention is on the graphic not on David McCandless. He next goes in and gives away where he got the data source from, the data from, what the different colors mean, what the different sizes mean, we know that in our understanding of pre-attentive attributes, these are things that are going to jump right off the screen at the audience. Give them the answer to what those changes are. If you start into your story when your audience still has questions, they will not be there with you, they will be thinking about the questions that they're hoping to get answered. Ensure that your audience stays with you by answering those questions right away. The next thing that McCandless does is he gives away the insight. He says, "This is why I am showing this to you. This is what you will see in the data." Right. He has now established for them in their minds, a statement of fact that they want to substantiate, it's human nature for them now to seek justification for that. He then goes into a couple of examples that clearly illustrate and substantiate that insight. Now, if he had flipped these again, he could've told a masterful story but the audience either would have gotten lost on where he was going or might have not understood how everything related together. By giving the insight first and then following with substantiation, you've done that in a way that your audience will better receive. Finally, McCandless takes this graphic and makes it much more personal for them, tells them why this is important to them, bringing the whole thing to a close. You can do this method on any graphic at all. Here's a graphic that I showed earlier, this is the way that I would use the five-step process to explain it. This is the number of cases of measles in the United States from 1928 to 2002. Now, you as the audience know what this is. Right? Go in and answer the questions. What does the color mean? These are things that you would be interested in knowing, because that's going to pop right off the screen for you. Then, I tell you what it says, then I go in and show you cases that substantiate that before finally talking about why this is important. Another graphic that I showed earlier in the class, as well. Here's how you would apply that in the five-step process. This is a graph of google.com query volume in Brazil. You now know what this is, I take away the questions. What does the blue line mean? What does the red line mean? What does the gray mean? Right. These are things that you know your audience will want to know. Take those away. Give them insight, follow-up with examples and close the presentation by saying, "This is why this is important or what this means to you." Those five steps will really help you take a graphic and ensure your audience understands it. It would be such a shame to put so much effort into the polish and visual, that we are creating in the story that we want to tell and then lose your audience in those last five yards.Right? Ensure that they are with you, that they understand what you're communicating by following this McCandless method when you are presenting your graphics. It's important for us understand that this style, the way that we do stand on our feet and present these visuals, that last five yards of our communication journey are very important. We run the risk of losing our audience and losing all the work that we've done to that point, if we can't do this effectively. The questions that will pop into our audiences' minds when they see our visual, will serve to distract them or keep them from us, as we're moving through the narrative. Ensure that you take those questions off the table and particularly off their minds by giving them the answers right away. The insight should precede this substantiating facts. Give the inside away, tell them this is what you will feel, here are the reasons why and build the case afterwards, not the other way around. Don't feel like you need to lead your audience through this story that, there's a great reveal for dramatic sake. You run the risk of losing them and that is a very real and great risk. Finally, this McCandless method is a five-step approach. Well, ensure that you are presenting data is the right way, build that into your practice, build that habit. Do on graphics, that you see all over the place. If you can do it on a graphic, that you're not so close to and haven't been working on, then you can clearly apply this method and clearly communicate to work that is your own that you have put effort into. So in this module, we've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about how we can ensure enrich content through emotional connection. We talked about the need to bring sophistication to our charts and how we do that. We talked about improving legibility by great attention to detail as Wong is introduced. Finally, here at the end, that final step in our communication journey, we have displayed the right way, the five-step McCandless method in presenting and communicating verbally data visualization.
