Why visual storytelling works

Visual storytelling works because humans are wired to process visual information more quickly and effectively than text or data alone. Additionally, visuals can help to create an emotional connection with the audience, which can be a powerful tool for engaging and inspiring action.

If you feel that maths is difficult and you don't enjoy it, don't worry, you're not alone. Rightly or wrongly, "maths anxiety" is well recognised and can be a result of many things, from poor teaching to a perception that you are somehow born good or bad at maths.

Yet even though we know our audience may be uncomfortable with numbers - or we ourselves may be - we don't often make the numbers in our work easy to understand.

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Consider this story from TimesLive, reporting on fuel price increases.

Petrol and diesel prices in SA reached record highs today, and have hit consumers hard.

The department of mineral resources and energy announced price increases of R2.33 (95 ULP) and R2.43/l (93 ULP), with the wholesale price of diesel rising by R1.07 (50ppm) and R1.10/l (500ppm).

The price hikes would have been worse had government not extended the R1.50 fuel levy holiday that was due to have expired on May 31, but this is scant comfort for motorists who have been pummeled by increases due to high oil prices and a weak rand.

The cost of running a car is increasingly eating into consumers’ disposable incomes, leading to calls for government to reduce taxes which make up more than 30% of fuel prices.

It costs around R300 more to fill a Volkswagen Polo Vivo than it did one year ago, based on the inland price of 95 ULP petrol rising to R24.17, compared to R17.13 in June 2021. It costs nearly R700 more to fill a Toyota Hilux diesel bakkie.

Here is what it costs to fill some of SA’s most popular vehicles compared to a year ago, and their current cost per kilometre based on their claimed fuel consumption. It is based on the inland prices of 50ppm diesel (R23.23) and 95 ULP petrol (R24.17).

• There are 17 different numbers, not including dates, in just seven sentences. Some of the prices indicated are retail, some are wholesale. Some are marked as per litre (/l), while some are per litre prices but are not shown as such. The really important details - how much a litre of petrol costs - are in the penultimate paragraph.

This is not to single out TimesLive for criticism - this kind of reporting happens all the time. We know our audience may be uncomfortable with numbers, we know they may not read English as a first language. Yet we use numbers in convoluted ways that are hard to follow.

Here's the price of 95 octane fuel charted over time, in a simple Google Sheets chart.

Would this not have been much easier to read?

Easier, quicker, Better?

Lets look at another example of its proven success

If it worked for Einstein...

Data-driven storytelling in all its forms isn't really about maths. It's about clear communication using the most appropriate narrative tool. Compare these two photos of Albert Einstein.

The image on the left is a famous photograph staged for the press before a lecture in Pittsburgh (taken by the Pittsburgh Telegraph). There's a very clear subtext to this image: we know Einstein is a genius, because we don't understand the mathematical symbols on the blackboard in front of him.

In the image on the right, however, Einstein is lecturing PhD students at Oxford University. Look at the blackboard behind him - see how in the classroom environment he is visualising the information he is presenting in charts?

Even at the most advanced level of mathematics, visualisations are critical to help an audience understand data. So why don't we use them more when communicating with readers?

Read this explainer to find out more about why data visualisations are important.

Data visualisations give us a lens to comprehend enormous amounts of different pieces of data at once and decipher the meaning of a larger emerging picture. Think about this;

“It is easy to count 10 birds flying in the sky, while a whole flock is almost impossible, it's the same with data sets.”

Before we can start to comprehend the data and build visualisations - the data must first be gathered and sorted (scraped and cleaned) to ensure its quality, reliability and validity. Once the data is available for analysis, we use various data visualisation methodologies to create impactful representations of the data that highlight particular contexts . The same applies to data in which high quantity data is difficult to decipher meaning. We need to create visual representations of this information to understand this information.

“Now imagine this flock was made up of different species of birds and you had to count them by that, this task beccomes even harder”

From the Visualisations interesting aspects of the data can be displayed graphically in a way that is easily understood. By developing visualisations to look at government procurement data we are able to comprehend a large amount of data (at once) and find meaning in order to understand the situation better.