The more complex or advanced the analysis is, the easier is to forget about those little data points full of knowledge and learnings (the little po-ints, patent pending…).

Histograms, box-plots, bar plots, line graphs (even pie charts for that matter), are very useful tools both for descriptive analysis (to understand) and explicative purposes (to persuade), but they may lead to wrong conclusions or partial learnings if we don’t check-and-show some data examples in detail.

When trying to create your data storytelling (specially for complex topics or very technical ones) please provide some actual examples (or synthetic if needed!) of the data underneath. This will help your audience to confirm your insights or challenge them in a much healthier way.

Seeing is believing, but feeling is being sure.

John Ray

For example, if I reckon that a sample dataset may be poor due to a strong bias towards provider “P”, I may show some cool graphs showing this issue, but people will really feel it when, for example, plotting some random points in the map where my audience can see that they fully overlap with the points obtained from provider “P”.

Another example: imagine that after analysing your data, you find out that the field “price ($)” for flight tickets may be in different units that the expected (like yens for example). Let’s assume that you are exploring a big dataset with millions of “origin – destination” combinations and from different countries. Well, you may create many histograms, outlier analysis or complex graphs, but for your audience just a 3-row table with some tickets with the columns “country”, “destination”, “price”, “country_of_sell”, may be enough to “feel” the issue instead of challenging it.

Pro tip: sometimes we may not find the perfect data points to explain something due to inherent noise in the data or other reasons. In this case, creating a “toy-problem” with synthetic data is a very interesting tool to add to our arsenal.

The point is (pun intended) that providing some examples of your data can help simplify the complex and better engage with your audience.