Promoting Insight: A Case Study of How to Incorporate Interaction in Existing Data Visualizations

Visualizations became essential to understand large datasets and abstract information. Data Visualizations are increasingly used to tell compelling stories, particularly in journalism. In order to engage the users with complex data, interaction techniques are incorporated into storytelling, emerging narrative visualization. Narrative visualization attempts not only to present information with context, but also to allow users to explore the dataset, find patterns or structures in the data, providing the users with control over the insights she/he gains from interaction. Interaction techniques play a key role in narrative visualization improving understanding of the data and stimulating insights through discovery. In this paper, we explore the benefits of adding interaction techniques to data visualization. Drawing on case studies from Portuguese news media, we identified strategies to enhance storytelling in visualizations and to provide better insights through different types of interactivity.