With the increasing number of people using electronic devices to stay connected to the world, the volume of information that we all digest has exploded exponentially. But human brains can struggle to understand and make sense of all this data so we often rely on abstraction and analogy to help. Data visualization is a combination of these two things and can help businesses comprehend big data and take action. As such, visualization can be critical to the success and growth of a company.
If you think your business could benefit from a better understanding of its data, keep reading to learn how to create compelling stories to inform and influence decisions.
Provide Context for Your Data
When you give your stakeholders context for data, you can enhance their understanding of the data, prompting them to make quicker and easier decisions. Background information also helps stakeholders understand predictions or recommendations, which allows them to make finely-tuned decisions.
Context is necessary even in simple use cases of data visualization, such as sales performance. For example, sales figures on their own will not make sense unless you set the scene of time period, goals, benchmarks, and more. You can present your sales team metrics and compare them with past goals to help viewers make sense of the data and understand how to move forward. The more context, the easier it is for people to make decisions. Use colors, arrows, text, and other visual cues to help people see how they should interpret the data. Hiring a data insight professional can also help as they’re trained in interpreting and organizing large datasets for others.
Make Visualizations Easy on the Eyes
Keep your charts simple. Content marketing puts a premium on short and simple posts—they need to be ‘snackable,’ to keep up with people’s diminishing attention spans. If you need to create a lot of visualizations, you should design them with their overall impact in mind. This is another area where hiring a visualization professional can be helpful to ensure you have presentation-ready charts and reports.
If you do outsource this work, be sure to partner with someone who knows how to incorporate design principles into visualizations. Besides providing massive amounts of information all at once, visualizations must tell stories, and the right agency will help you uncover the ones hidden in your data. They’ll know how to use visualizations to break down difficult concepts and ideas easily, figure out what other information you need, and create more charts to answer other questions that crop up.
Prioritize User Engagement
Using suggestions, predictions, and actionable insights from data to influence workflows will help employees make better decisions. A savvy business owner will discover patterns or anomalies in their data and create action plans—no need for complex tool sets or reports or spending all of your time parsing through data.
Moreover, since data is becoming more and more significant in commerce, business intelligence will become a necessity for more companies. More people will need access to cloud business intelligence capabilities, and a data visualization culture will become as important as workplace benefits, values, and mission statements. Employing data visualizations as part of a business strategy will allow stakeholders to ensure that they can develop and meet finely tuned goals.
Conclusion
Data is only as good as a person’s ability to consume, understand, and share them. Hiring a data science service can take analyzing and interpreting off your hands and allow you to focus on other areas of your business.
Gemini can help you create visual narratives from your company’s data. We are a data insight agency transforming how people make decisions through advanced analytics solutions. Get in touch with us to learn more!
