Essential Data Visualization Tips for Engaging, Understanding, and Making an Impact

More businesses are now “drowning” under a massive influx of data. Going by the latest estimates, 1.145 trillion megabytes of data is generated daily. Even more impressive is that data usage is no longer restricted to a few industry domains or sectors. Be it large corporations or small enterprises, every company generates valuable data through data visualization.

How does collected data impact the business decision-making process? Business users can easily interpret valuable trends and patterns from data through converting massive data points into a compelling “story” with actionable insights.

In essence, modern data analytics has enabled multiple business benefits, including:

• Unlocking the true potential of Big Data
• Providing real-time access to information
• Identifying and correcting any data inaccuracies

What are the Must-Do(s) for business users to realize immense potential? Let’s start with some of the best practices.

Best Practices for Business Users

Access to accurate and high-quality data is only part of the solution for business users. It’s equally important that business users correctly interpret data to improve decisions and solve their business problems. Here are some of the best practices for business users:

1. Define the Business Goal
   Effective data presentation must address business goals to remain relevant. Before visualizing the data, users must address the following questions:
   • Who is the intended audience for visualization?
   • What is the specific information (or message) being conveyed?
   • What is the desired outcome for the enterprise?
2. Drive Effective Decision-Making
   Data visualization must drive effective decision-making processes for business users.
   • Determine the business decision they must make and how visualization can help them.
   • Additionally, consider how frequently they need to make this decision and under what circumstances. For example, it could be an operational decision like approving an insurance claim or a strategic decision like exploring a new business opportunity.
3. Select the Right Visual Elements
   Data analysis works differently for business and technical users. Business users prefer to view simplified content on their dashboards. To that end, select the right elements to display information to business users based on their purpose. Here are some guidelines:
   • Use tables only to display a lot of structured information.
   • To effectively present the relationship between two or more variables in line and area charts can be useful.
   • Tree maps are powerful for comparing proportions based on area size.
   • Heatmaps are useful when representing data points using color.
4. Engage with Business Users
   Beyond business intelligence, metric-based notifications and regular email reports can ensure continuous engagement with business users. Through triggered notifications, users know immediately whenever any threshold level is passed. Email reports can encourage business users to explore their dashboards actively.

Factors That Impact for Business Users

For enterprises, multiple factors can influence the choice of methods and tools used. Here are some of the main factors:

• Target Audience
  As mentioned previously, visualized data must cater to the target audience’s requirements. Any visualization tool must adapt to the different needs of the target audience. For example, fitness app users prefer simplified data to represent their fitness progress
• Dashboard Design
  Data visualizers must strike the correct balance between simplicity and complexity for their dashboard design. An oversimplified dashboard may display insufficient information for business users. On the other hand, a complex dashboard may make it harder for them to extract relevant insights from the data.
• Static or Dynamic Data
  Data is either static (with quarterly or yearly changes) or dynamic (that keeps changing constantly). Enterprises can opt for static visualization or dynamic representation (time-based) depending on this factor.
• Functionality
  Businesses must choose visualization tools based on their functionality. Visualization tools must align with the business requirements. Selecting a device (with more functionalities) can also add to business costs instead of creating more business impact.

How Emergys Can Help with Effective Visual Analytics

Through our efficient reporting and dashboard services, Emergys empower business users with instant decision-making capabilities. With real-time data insights, our team enables its global customers to leverage the benefits of visual analytics and reporting.

We understand the importance of valuable insights for organizations to make business decisions. Our technology team has expertise in insightful analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, MicroStrategy, etc. Here is a successful case study of how a leading manufacturing company implemented enterprise-level analytical reporting to create a single version of the truth that connected all departments.