How does visual communication change at the descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive stages of the analytical journey? Join Simon as he explains this, and identifies clear design strategies for each stage that will help anyone communicate their data more effectively.

Effective communication of data is crucial to any business, and those working with data have the opportunity to provide clear messages to their audiences but can often leave stakeholders asking “so what?”.

This session will demonstrate easily achievable techniques that can be applied at whichever stage of the analytical journey you are in, to help increase the impact of data and lead to better decisions.

This session will explore:

• Descriptive - what has happened: The crucial role descriptive reporting plays in business, but how it can often leave our audience exploring the data for answers. This section explores how regular reports and dashboards can be made more informative.
• Diagnostic - why has it happened: To provide commentary on why something has happened, not only does an individual need analytical skills, but also comprehensive business understanding. Learn how position, the similarity of colour, and connection can make an audience's process of finding those diagnostic statements easier.
• Predictive - what is going to happen: Businesses being able to understand what is going to happen in the future is crucial. But whether using basic calculations to make these predictions or the most advanced machine learning AI models, ultimately we are left with an output of data. Understand how we can use our tools like colour, size, and position to draw attention to these predictive elements.
• Prescriptive - what to do about it: Anytime we are communicating with data, we should be looking to explain it, tell our audience what is interesting about it, and provide a recommendation on how to proceed. And to explain, we need to use words. This section explores combining words with data, and using words to form an overarching narrative to create a memorable data-driven story.

Learning outcomes:

• Understanding of the stages of the analytical journey, and within each of those stages, techniques to apply which will better inform, direct, and advise their audiences
• Practical and easy to implement formatting design tips which will ensure audiences spend more time focusing on the important aspects of the data and less time processing the visual and trying to understand it.
• Demonstration of how a small presentation can be delivered which walks an audience through a data-driven story.