SHOW, DON'T TELL

People see stats (both accurate and inaccurate) more than ever before. Adam Lee asks whether that has changed the way we discuss insight

We’re approaching a tipping point in terms of understanding data, which is awesome. Data practitioners have worked hard to demonstrate that data and insight aren’t just mountains of intangible numbers or impenetrable reports. We’ve fought to take the data to the people! We’ve shown the power that can exist in insight, when the data story is told in an engaging and relevant way.

We’re also seeing public awareness of data grow. Using NOW Corpus, the online news keyword analysis tool, we can see that the use of the term ‘data’ in the news has grown 70 per cent since 2010 (from 251 times per million words to 429 times per million). With that growth of awareness can come fear and nervousness of the pervasiveness of data and its uses. And some of that fear is well-founded. So we have to be data advocates in a manner that is both engaging and ethical.

What does that have to do with data and insight in experimentation? Well, explanations of experimentation run the risk of being focused on statistical rigour and data-driven logic, especially if you’re just telling a client about an outcome. This can make experimentation appear harder to understand than it needs to be and therefore harder to demonstrate the commercial value of.