In an increasingly data-driven world, data democratization that everyone can access, understand, and leverage data to make informed decisions becomes a vision worth pursuing. In the process of data democratization, data storytelling that combines storytelling and data visualizations plays a critical role in communicating data insights to the general public engagingly and effectively. With the advancement and variation of communication media, data storytelling emerged in various forms. Thus, systematic investigations of the design strategies of data storytelling are demanded for facilitating story creation. In this thesis, I conducted qualitative and quantitative studies to derive design strategies of data stories and experimental studies to verify their effectiveness to provide guidance...[ Read more ]

In an increasingly data-driven world, data democratization that everyone can access, understand, and leverage data to make informed decisions becomes a vision worth pursuing. In the process of data democratization, data storytelling that combines storytelling and data visualizations plays a critical role in communicating data insights to the general public engagingly and effectively. With the advancement and variation of communication media, data storytelling emerged in various forms. Thus, systematic investigations of the design strategies of data storytelling are demanded for facilitating story creation. In this thesis, I conducted qualitative and quantitative studies to derive design strategies of data stories and experimental studies to verify their effectiveness to provide guidance on:

(1) Enhancing the comprehension of data stories. While novel and customized data visualizations are used in data stories for creating compelling storytelling experiences, without proper guidance, unfamiliar visualizations could confuse the general audience. Prior work has proposed various forms of guidance on how to read a chart; however, little research has explored how to introduce a visualization in oral presentations which is a common and important data storytelling scenario. To fill this gap, my first study aims at giving clear verbal introductions for visualization in oral presentations.

(2) Creating a compelling data storytelling experience. I collect and analyze professional practices of data stories in the wild to extract their design strategies related to the narrative structure and visual design, the two most discussed aspects that determine the storytelling experience. In the second study, I propose a design space for applying Frey-tag’s Pyramid, a traditional story structure, to data stories. The third study focuses on data stories in virtual reality that is in an early stage with little empirical knowledge of the visual designs. In particular, I draw inspiration from popular 3D data videos and study how to adapt them to VR data videos.

I hope the design implications from these study results would guide and inspire data storytellers in creating understandable and compelling data stories, serve as prior studies for (semi-)automatic data story authoring tools, and ultimately contribute to efficiently and effectively communicating data to the general public.