Presenting Visual Data—Intelligently
For those of you who struggle to create unique, interesting presentations, we’ve talked a lot about presentation design (see here and here). The basics: each presentation’s content should be inherently interesting or important to your audience. Also, your audience’s information needs should dictate your presentation’s content.However, engaging audiences with your presentations often requires one more element: an interesting visual data display. Here’s the rub: you’ll likely think your data sets, by virtue of findings, are meaningful. But consider your audience’s understanding of complex ideas or messages. For example, many business-oriented presentations endlessly cite statistics, ROI, growth, and more to prove the value of projects or initiatives. But to most audience members, even basic percentages, currencies (foreign or domestic), and raw numbers aren’t meaningful without bases for comparison.
That’s where visual data becomes important. And I’m not talking about PowerPoint’s extensive selection of clipart. Pretty pictures simply aren’t valuable if they don’t speak 1,000 words—at least. You have a limited amount of time to make your points, and visuals should help you make them. Consider this: if your visuals are meaningless to your audience, you might as well put together a 12-page position paper and post it to your Intranet.
Also, your audience should have no questions about why you choose any single example or illustration in a presentation. Visuals should make difficult points clear, and illustrate your strategic messages in ways words simply can’t.
We’ve extolled Edward Tufte for his data design genius, but a number of great resources are available. One in particular, IBM’s Many Eyes, provides a website where you can load nearly any kind of data, choose a format for display, and the result? A simple, visually appealing way to display numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. The site will help you to add texture to simple, bivariate data, as well as lengthy spreadsheets’ worth. Granted, you may need to understand data analysis to use this site effectively, but it’s worth a look when you’re building presentations… Check out some examples here.
No matter what kind of resource you choose, be sure to think through your visual presentations. Treat them as what they are: crucial opportunities to reach your most important stakeholders. Done well, these assemblies will help build awareness of your strategic messages, while intelligently-presented data will drive critical messages home.
