I like to think that the hero in your data story is your audience. The hero is the person who starts with conflict and, through the narrative journey, is transformed to resolve this conflict. That’s what you want the data story to accomplish for your audience — start with a question and move your audience (hero) to actions that will resolve the question.
At least I used to think it was that simple. Then someone raised their hand at a recent presentation and asked me: “If your audience is the hero, who is the villain in your story?”
I was puzzled. Does there need to be a villain? Who is opposing your audience/hero in a data story? Was there something else in the data story that best represents the hero?
The question made me reconsider whether we could point to another element as characters in our stories. Was there something else that is the focus of attention, that evolves and improves or declines into madness — what was our Batman and what is our Joker?
Perhaps it is worth considering whether metrics are our characters. Metrics are the critical pivot point — the thing that we want to see change for the better. Or be removed entirely — like the seemingly crazy girl on The Bachelor.
So consider:
Like heroes or villains, we only want a few to focus on. Unless you’ve got some powerful engagement, the attention of your audience isn’t able to grasp a massive cast of characters like Game of Thrones. Your metric selections should be carefully curated and intentional in the way that an author creates characters for a book.
Our metric heroes need to have substance and depth of meaning. Vanity metrics have no place in your data stories.
Metrics can be viewed as good or bad. Understand what your audience wants to happen to this metric. Are they a hero metric that needs to succeed (e.g. revenue) or a villain metric that we want to see shrivel like the Wicked Witch of the West? Some metrics can be flipped around from good to bad, e.g. win rate vs. loss rate.
Bring some identity into how you present each metric. After all, it should be an individual with a character arc. You may not want to create a musical motif for each metric (a la Star Wars), but you could give each metric its own style, color, and/or icon.
Once you have mastered your character selection, your data stories will not only be easier to understand, but they will appeal even more to your desired audience.