In our fast paced world with faster moving businesses, decision makers need to see the big picture, which keeps getting bigger! The rampant love affair between tech and big data extends generously to data visualization. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. We respond to and process visual data way better than any other type of data. Visual content engages your brain, is faster and easier to consume, and peaks instant interest.
Here’s why businesses should leverage data visualization:
1. Make smarter business decisions:
The main purpose of visualization is storytelling. By designing the visuals in a meaningful way we can help the users grasp the meaning of huge data in a single glance. Data correlations can be formed using the right visuals leading to intelligent business decisions thereby achieving the business’ goals.
2. Illuminating patterns and trends that could go undetected in text-based data:
A large amount of complicated data when displayed in a visual form allows users to identify relationships and provide meaning to their data. This enables the users to pinpoint the areas that require greater attention and focus.
3. Simple and time-saving for non-technical people:
Let’s compare two results generated from the same dataset. One result is in tabular form while the other is a simple bar chart. Looking and understanding the information available from the data in tabular form is a task that requires a user to go through each row of that table and put time and effort into understanding what that data is trying to communicate, whereas one glance at the bar chart and the user can instantly make sense of the data reducing minutes to hours of effort to mere seconds.
4. Understanding wider data sets within shorter periods:
Millions of points of data when coupled with a number of various dimensions, variables and columns require a lot of space and a lot of time is involved in reducing it into a form from which some sense can be made out of the data. But the same data if converted into a visual form involves less space, less time, less complexity and effort.
5. Affordable and accessible:
It is no longer restricted to conglomerates; it is affordable and accessible for all businesses;
Small and medium sized businesses often refrain from using data visualization and business intelligence tools due to fear of costs escalations and a wrong assumption that they require too much time, energy and are cumbersome to create. However, with the evolution of new technologies, powerful BI software has become more available, accessible, and affordable especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). More self-service tools are being designed for SMEs so that they can reap many of the crucial benefits that big businesses or corporate gets from their BI systems. Using tools like Tableau, Plotly, Infogram, they can discover historical, new and emerging trends, patterns, track efficiency of their marketing campaign etc.
