The real challenge as a data scientist is to turn a beautiful visualization into something more meaningful. Every data has a compelling story behind it. Its simply a matter of presentation. To create compelling visualization, we focus less on the actual visualization and more on what’s behind it: a well crafted story.
Create a narrative: Whatever the dataset you’re visualizing, there’s a story that comes out of it. This can be as simple as the change over time- what is important to realize is that it’s not just numbers. it’s representing a point in a larger narrative. You just need to figure out exactly what that narrative is.
Every Story Needs Conflict: A compelling story hinges on conflict. There needs to be some sort of tension in the story. While that might not play out in terms of “character development” or a plot arc, there is still a way to convey this tension—that something is wrong, or broken, or being fixed. There is significance to the data beyond it simply presenting something new.
Identifying The Narrative Elements: The five main elements of a narrative are the character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme. We do not present a solution, that’s for the audience to conclude themselves
Build On Your Story: The challenge for most data storytellers, however is that they’re not working with “compelling” data. You could be working with cell phone customer data in China, or consumer behavior based on eCommerce search queries. So how do you make that into something persuasive and beautiful?
Keep It Simple, Keep It Safe: The key is in simplicity and patience. Arguably the greatest teacher of non-fiction writing, William Zinsser, had a lot to say about simplicity that apply to data visualization, notably: “writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.
Whatever data it is that you’re presenting, you have the ability to make it interesting. It’s a matter of discovering the conflict that’s within the numbers—taking the time in your analysis to decide not just what the conclusions are, but also the implications of the conflict for your audience.
Source: https://www.import.io/post/how-to-build-compelling-stories-from-your-data-sets/