Data Storytelling in Data Visualisation: Does it Enhance the Eficiency and Efectiveness of Information Retrieval and Insights Comprehension?

Data storytelling (DS) is rapidly gaining attention as an approach that integrates data, visuals, and narratives to create data stories that can help a particular audience to comprehend the key messages underscored by the data with enhanced efciency and efectiveness. It is been posited that DS can be especially advantageous for audiences with limited visualisation literacy, by presenting the data clearly and concisely. However, empirical studies confrming whether data stories indeed provide these benefts over conventional data visualisations are scarce. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study with 103 participants to determine whether DS indeed improve both efciency and efectiveness in tasks related to information retrieval and insights comprehension. Our fndings suggest that data stories do improve the efciency of comprehension tasks, as well as the efectiveness of comprehension tasks that involve a single insight, compared with conventional visualisations. Interestingly, these benefts were not associated with participants' visualisation literacy.