05/03/2025 • Mehmet Emre Toktay

Choosing the Right Data Storytelling Format: When Scrollytelling Works

Let's be real: no one cares about your genius idea unless you make it stupidly easy to understand. History's full of "brilliant" flops that died because the presentation was, well, boring. Today? If your data viz looks like an Excel sheet on steroids, good luck.

Why Your Perfect Dashboard Fails

Perfect data visualization isn't innate to humans—it must adapt to the audience's needs, preferences, and even personalities. This adaptability is what shapes projects. As a proof of concept, I once built an interactive clustering dashboard in Plotly to showcase the depth of data exploration possible. Now, I'm advocating for a more modern approach: scrollytelling.

Why Scrolling Wins

Smartphones have rewired our behavior. We scroll endlessly, often subconsciously, and this habit triggers engagement. Our brains are trained to swipe first and ask questions never. Why fight it? By designing presentations in the same scrollable, visual format people consume daily (think social media or news apps), we can:

• Create instant familiarity with the audience
• Reduce cognitive friction (no "new" interaction patterns to learn)
• Boost retention through bite-sized, progressive storytelling

Tools like R2D3 elevate this further, turning data into immersive visual narratives.

Case Study: Optimizing Pop-Up Campaigns in iGaming

To test this, I customized a scrollytelling template for a real-world scenario:

An iGaming site launched a pop-up campaign. Through A/B testing, we identified the ideal timing for these pop-ups—a tweak predicted to significantly boost conversions. The challenge? Convincing executives.