This weekend I went down a rabbit hole with my 9 year-old daughter. Almost literally. She’s been dying to adopt a bunny, and I was able to (temporarily) redirected that energy into building a Juicebox bunny adoption data story. The project was a fun father-daughter learning experience that, upon reflection, was chocked full of lessons for data translators of any age.
Let me take you through a high-speed version of what we learned together:
Start with inspiration
No matter your skills or tools, it takes real commitment to create an effective data story. To push you through the process, you’ll need the energy of inspiration. My daughter was not lack in this department.
Good data is hard to find
Getting your hands on the right data to tell your story is seldom easy. Often there will be gaps between what you’d like to show and what you’re able to acquire. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
In our case, we found a data set from Wikipedia that provided information on the nearly 200 rabbit breeds worldwide.
Like cleaning a bunny hutch, cleaning data is the task you wish you could skip
My daughter learned the same difficult lesson that thousands of novice data scientists eventually learn — a majority of their job is involved with prepping and cleaning data.
We had to reformat data like crazy to make the Wikipedia data useful.
Designing an actionable story
My daughter wanted to give other children a website that would not only let them explore bunny breeds, but also help convince their parents that they are responsible enough to help care for one. She learned that data storytelling isn’t just about the data — it can include information, tools, and guidance that helps your audience. She added a sample note to help her peers and created a set of slides about taking care of rabbits.
Making your data explorable
We wanted to present the bunny breeds in a way that would let anyone explore the information. Fortunately, drill-able exploration is where Juicebox excels.
Making your message attractive
We have an old slide from our data visualization presentations that emphasizes “Looks matter”. We are drawn to attractive things (I know, Captain Obvious). That’s why we like to make sure that our Juicebox apps look beautiful. My daughter — who has a better sense of color than I do — found a color theme and incorporated it into her app.
Your first draft won’t be perfect.
One of the reasons we’ve worked so hard to make Juicebox easy and lightweight is that we know that telling data stories is an evolution. You will receive feedback and there will be opportunities to refine your message. Making those improvements shouldn’t be a new development project.
I tried sharing this app with one rabbit adoption site and received a scathing response suggesting that adoption choices shouldn’t be based on breed and children should not bug their parents for a bunny (a point that I don’t disagree with, but might be a little disconnected from reality).
Lesson learned.
If you want to teach your child the basics of data storytelling, now might be the right time to sign up for early access to Juicebox.