If your organization often uses dashboards to explore data and then present findings in reports and presentations, this talk will dive into the arc from story-finding to storytelling and give practical recommendations for how to adapt dashboard content for other uses.

From Story-finding with Dashboards to Storytelling with Data

The best dashboards are designed for data exploration. You can identify key insights, filter to specific periods and segments, and make data more accessible across organizations. 

But designing for exploration story-finding isn't the same as designing for storytelling with data. So why do we so often see dashboard screenshots copy-pasted into presentations and reports?

During this talk, we'll explore differences in our design decisions when we're crafting dashboards compared to data visualizations to share an analysis findings, including:

• How we reshape text to guide a user compared to writing a headline

• Focusing our use of color to highlight key points

• Adding context and combining dashboard components to build an effective data story

We'll use a few practical examples to walk through common mistakes when using content from a dashboard to craft a data story, and close with ways we can collaborate more effectively with users to support using dashboards as a launchpad for better data storytelling.