As a business owner or marketer, you are always looking for ways to improve your online presence and increase engagement with your audience. One powerful tool that you may not be using to its full potential is data visualisation.
Data visualisation is the process of representing data graphically, allowing you to quickly and easily analyse complex information. In this article, we will explore the many benefits of data visualisation, and show you how it can help you to improve your marketing efforts.
Any business intelligence (BI) and analytics system should prioritise the visualisation of data as one of its most critical skills.
It assists individuals in translating complicated data into a visual context, such as a chart or a graph, in identifying trends that statistics alone are unable to disclose effectively, and in discovering hidden patterns within your dashboard.
Data visualisation also offers a wide range of other advantages, such as making it simpler to comprehend the relationship between processes and outcomes.
Software designed specifically for data visualisation, which visually portrays complicated information, is required in order to make data visualisation practicable. While attempting to convey the meaning of enormous datasets, they make use of a variety of visualisation techniques, such as graphs, charts, and heat maps.
As a consequence of this, you won't have to dig through tables or reports packed with raw measurements, which makes it much simpler for you to examine big volumes of data.
In the end, these tools assist you in rapidly comprehending important information and in making timely decisions regarding your organisation. Tableau, Yellowfin, and Microsoft Power BI are the three most effective technologies currently available for data visualisation. You can find a tutorial that can help you get up to speed by clicking on the link below.
Quick Links To Data Science Online Courses
RMIT Online
Graduate Certificate in Data Science
- 8 months intensive, part-time
- Jan, Mar, May, July, Aug, Oct
- $3,840 per course, FEE-HELP available
The University of New South Wales
Graduate Diploma in Data Science (Online)
- As little as 16 months
- 8 courses
- Study Intakes: January, March, May, July, September and October
James Cook University
Master of Data Science Online
- 24 months , Part-time
- $3,700 per subject , FEE-HELP is available
- 12 (One subject per each 7-week study period)
University Of Technology Sydney
Applied Data Science for Innovation (Microcredential)
- 6 weeks
- Avg 14 hrs/wk
- $1,435.00
The Brain Is Programmed for Visualization
Why are charts and graphs a more effective means of communication? It's possible that this is due to the fact that humans are hardwired to comprehend visual clues more quickly than written words.
To put it another way, people do not come "preprogrammed" to communicate through written language. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist and reading researcher, writes in her book "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" that "We were never born to read."
According to Wolf, the ability to see is hardwired into the human brain, however, the ability to read does not come naturally. She uses the same terminology that computer scientists would use to describe the brain, referring to it as having a "open architecture." She says that the brain's system "is adaptable enough to alter — or reorganise — to fit the changing demands on it."
She continues by saying, "Due to this design, we are born into the world preprogrammed with the potential to modify what is provided to us by nature, so that we might transcend beyond it." It would appear that right from the beginning, we have been genetically positioned to make significant advances.
Because of the fact that our brains are so malleable, we have the potential to pick up new skills like reading and languages.
According to Wolf, reading requires engaging the "visual circuits" that are already there in the brain in order to translate the letters on the page into words.
This decoding happens with data visualisation, but it may happen with any picture or symbol. In point of fact, the visual medium is quickly replacing the written word.
By taking into account how important data visualisation is in the sales process, Wolf's findings are quite noteworthy.
Charts, graphs, and other visual representations may be absorbed more quickly, provide assistance to visual learners, and provide insights and things that can be acted upon, all of which contribute to greater sales productivity.
Key Benefits of Data Visualization Tools
Data visualisation tools have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason.
These tools can help businesses of all sizes to understand their data better, make informed decisions, and ultimately improve their bottom line.
Better Business Decisions
The process of data visualisation makes it possible to construct visuals that are both intuitive and interactive easily. As a result, you will have a much easier time analysing complicated datasets in your dashboards.
That makes it much simpler for you to locate important insights. Data visualisation software, such as Yellowfin, Power BI, and Tableau, streamlines the process of showing complicated data in a way that is easily comprehensible for everyone by making use of straightforward visual representations, such as charts and graphs.
Humans have a greater capacity to comprehend items that are presented visually as opposed to in written form, such as reports.
You may make difficult data readily intelligible and available to everyone by presenting it graphically on your dashboard. This will allow you to make the data.
As a consequence of this, the data visualisation tool has the potential to improve teamwork and communication throughout the decision-making process. Also, it has the potential to cut down on the imprecision of the data drastically. As a result, you will be able to improve the quality of your business decisions and expand your operation.
Easier Trend Analysis and Exploration
The most effective data visualisation technologies, such as Yellowfin and Power BI, make trend analysis simple and straightforward.
They make it possible for you to swiftly examine past and present events and make predictions about the future, such as the probable increase or decrease in sales and income for the next year.
While conducting trend analysis, you have a variety of different graphical options to choose from. The Area Graph, Line Graph, Histogram, Bubble Chart, Spiral Plot, and Steam Graph are some examples of graphs that may be found.
These solutions typically provide comprehensive dashboard and visualisation design tools so that you can apply best practices to the charts and graphs you select.
These best practices include the customisation of colour, font, and rich media to make each visual uniquely tailored for the audience you have in mind, as well as visually appealing.
Yellowfin is one example of a product that, in addition to providing a flexible toolset, gives users access to a broad variety of less common visualisation kinds.
Identify the Correlation Between Operations and Results Faster
The concept of correlation is one of the most useful tools in the field of statistics. By the use of data visualisations, it is possibly better to understand the connections between the many independent variables.
When it comes to business intelligence, finding a link between the operations of a business and the performance of the market is of the utmost importance.
It allows you to remain ahead of the competition, track linkages between operations and overall business performance, and make crucial strategic choices more effectively so that your firm can expand and surpass the competition.
Recognise New Trends
Data visualisation is a technique that analysts frequently refer to as a tool for bringing order out of chaos. When it comes to recognising new tendencies in the corporate world, this is a very helpful tool. After the data has been visually brought to order and cleaned up, you will be able to see movements in market preferences and changes in customer preferences. The display of large amounts of data has several advantages, including this one.
If you are able to spot emerging tendencies in the market, this might lead to a rise in your earnings; but, if you are unable to recognise shifting market conditions, this could have devastating effects on individual businesses.
As a result of this, one of the most important aspects of operating a successful company is ensuring that the whole team has access to high-quality data visualisations in a timely way.
The Key Performance Indicator is one of the methods that companies use to evaluate how successfully they are accomplishing their primary goals.
When it comes to communicating the performance of people, departments, and entire organisations, these KPI reports mainly rely on data visualisation technologies.
On a strategic level, they may be used to examine the health of the firm, and on a more personal level, they can be used to monitor the productivity of individual personnel.
More Accurate Customer Sentiment Analysis
Instead of using convoluted and cluttered spreadsheets, more in-depth research on client attitudes may be conducted with the assistance of data visualisation, which presents the findings in the form of interactive charts, reports, and dashboards.
You will have an easier time understanding what people think about your brand or how your business operations are working as a whole if you use graphs and charts. You will also be able to communicate your understanding of these topics with others.
It enables you to enter the mindset of your target demographic, gain an understanding of the challenges they face and the preferences they have, and then apply analytics to develop substantially more effective business plans.
Foster More Business Users to Interact With Their Data
The data should be easily available to everyone within the company, which is one of the goals of implementing and utilising visualisation tools.
Using data visualisation as part of your reporting efforts (and adhering to best practises) will encourage your users to explore and manipulate data in order to uncover important factors using the aforementioned tools, which will help foster a data-driven culture as opposed to the traditional, intuition-based approach to decision-making.
Consider a situation in which you are observing a decline in the number of sales of a particular item. There is likely more than one explanation for it. So what really is the underlying cause?
You will be able to more actively investigate and correlate such a trend to actual item sales and a root cause if you represent your journey from identification to insight using graphs and charts. This will demonstrate the value of the solution overall to the enterprise as well as to the software users who are using your product.
A Window Into Automated Reporting and Contextualized Data
The application of technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) may make information easier to comprehend and more helpful.
The accuracy of the results obtained using powerful data visualisation solutions, such as Yellowfin BI and Power BI, may be improved over time through the support and integration of such technologies into the visualisation tools provided by these solutions (via auto-generated comparisons, explanations, alerts and more).
Moreover, Yellowfin provides support for yet another essential analytics tool known as Natural Language Query (NLQ).
It teaches you how to construct the appropriate questions to ask of your data so that you can look in the appropriate locations and makes it easier for you to develop business intelligence reports that are more accessible and useable by helping you comprehend the context behind the data.
It adheres to the industry's standard procedures while delivering data visualisations to the end user.
As a direct consequence of this, you will obtain additional measures that can be put into practice from the datasets.
Insight Into Hidden Patterns and Deeper Trends
Discovering previously unknown patterns is made easier by using data visualisation tools. They assist you in discovering patterns and links among complicated datasets that are not immediately evident without their assistance.
As a consequence of this, you will be able to get deeper insights and a better understanding of interrelationships.
For instance, sales projections produced with the assistance of data visualisation tools have a high probability of being spot on.
Because these tools make use of cutting-edge technology to uncover previously undiscovered patterns. In addition to this, the information is represented graphically using a variety of charts, such as bar charts and line charts.
As a result, you will have an easier time gaining insights about the industry that is both deeper and more precise.
Visualized Data Is Processed Faster
The text takes far more time and effort to process than visual stuff. According to findings published by experts at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the human retina is capable of transmitting data at a rate of around 10 million bits per second.
According to the news release, the retina is a portion of the brain that has developed into the eye through the course of evolution.
The notion of how rapidly our brains can detect pictures and make sense of them is at the heart of data visualisation.
According to James Haight, who works at Blue Hill Research, "The brain works using neural networks that enable us to predict patterns based on external stimuli at a very high pace." After a pattern has been learned, the human brain is quite good at identifying it again in the future.
You probably guessed correctly that one of the most important contributions that visual imagery makes to the pattern-recognition process in our brains. Hence, in this sense, the tools for data visualisation hit us right in the biological sweet spot.
It's possible that the human mind doesn't have an innate understanding of sophisticated statistical models or things like "R squared" values, yet we are quite good at recognising patterns in visual presentations.
In a world in which employees are inundated with information, graphics provide us with the ability to swiftly analyse and sort out the information that is essential to our work.
Data Visualization Dashboards Support Visual Learners
Learning styles differ across people in spite of the fact that the brain processes visual information for 90 percent of the information it receives. Some people are aural learners, while others learn best through kinesthetic experiences.
Visual learners make up the vast majority of the population, which is around 65 percent of the total. Data visualisation and the use of online technologies that facilitate data visualisation assist make it easier to grasp the information that is provided rapidly.
After the period of spreadsheets, current technology has turned information from boring spreadsheets into eye-catching and simple-to-understand charts and graphs. This marks the end of the spreadsheet era. The ability to graphically exhibit data and derive insights from that data is the goal of the online data visualisation tool.
The ability to immediately get a feel for the temperature of the business is extremely valuable to everyone in the company, from salesmen to CEOs.
Data Visualization Tools Show Insights That May Be Missed in Traditional Reports
If you can get everyone in the firm in the habit of looking at the dashboard reports and practising data visualisation, it will be easier to acquire an accurate image of the organisation.
Corey Crellin, Senior Manager of Product & Operations at Prosper Healthcare Lending, stated in a session at Dreamforce that his company adopted loose permissions with their CRM programme so that all users were able to create their own reports.
This was reported by Mr. Crellin in regard to his company's CRM programme. “[Senior managers] had good ideas,” says Crellin, “but the people on the front lines had even better ideas...they were finding new metrics and new ratios and a lot of those ratios that came from that quarter are ratios that are critical to us now.”
CRM is able to develop visualisations for your company once they have determined the facts and key performance indicators (KPIs) that they would like to have shown.
The following are some examples of reports that might be categorised as data visualisations: sales by period, sorted by sales person or product; deals in the pipeline, sorted by individual accounts; call time per client; or deals closed by sales rep.
What is the Purpose of Data Visualization?
The objective of using data visualisation may be easily understood. It is to derive meaning from the data and make use of the information for the advantage of the organisation. Having said that, data is multifaceted, and it gains greater value when it is displayed both individually and collectively.
Without visualisation, it is difficult to immediately explain the findings of the data analysis, recognise patterns that may be used to extract insights and interact with the data in a smooth manner.
Even without visualisation, data scientists can uncover patterns or flaws in the data. Yet, it is absolutely necessary to explain the conclusions of the data and to extract the important information from it. In this regard, having access to interactive data visualisation tools may make all the difference.
The continuing epidemic is a current example that is both topical and recent. Certainly, it is possible for data scientists to acquire insights by looking at the data. Data visualisation, on the other hand, is supporting specialists in remaining calm and informed despite the overwhelming amount of data.
- The effectiveness of massage for your audiences may be improved with the use of data visualisation, which also shows the results of data analysis in the most convincing manner. It brings the communications systems of the many groups and fields within the company together into a unified whole.
- By the use of visualisation, large volumes of data may be comprehended quickly and in a more efficient manner. It helps to understand the data better so that the effect of the data on the company can be measured, and it conveys the insight graphically to audiences both inside and outside of the organisation.
- In the absence of relevant information, decisions can't be made. Decision-makers now have access to more data and insights, which enables them to help in decision analysis. Unbiased data without inaccuracies allows access to the right kind of information and visualisation to represent that information and keep it relevant.
The display of data has the ability to provide solutions to a wide variety of business problems. All businesses must incorporate data visualisation tools and reap transformative benefits in their critical areas of operations.
Data Visualization Has a Creditable Impact on Businesses
But big data is rapidly becoming ubiquitous across sectors. The process of transforming vast amounts of data into meaningful data points is what is meant by the term "business intelligence."
Data visualisation is contributing to the effort by displaying the data in a concise manner that facilitates the transmission of the information to the human brain.
The ability to visually depict and communicate information effectively contributes significantly to the aesthetic appeal of visualisation.
Without data visualisation, companies in which the collection and analysis of data is the single most important factor would soon find themselves unable to compete.
The data visualisation benefits that firms choose to pursue can be the difference between success and failure. It is of the utmost importance to acknowledge that in this day and age, we do not have any shortcuts available to make quicker and better judgements if we do not visualise the facts.
Conclusion
In conclusion, data visualisation tools are essential for businesses of all sizes. These tools can help businesses analyse and interpret complex data sets, identify patterns and trends, and make informed decisions that can lead to better outcomes.
Additionally, data visualisation tools can improve efficiency, enhance communication, provide a competitive advantage, and improve customer understanding.
By incorporating data visualisation tools into their business strategy, businesses can gain a significant edge in the market. With the ability to quickly and easily analyse data, businesses can identify trends and opportunities that competitors may miss, and make decisions that drive growth and success.
If you haven't already, now is the time to consider incorporating data visualisation tools into your business strategy. Whether you are a small business owner or part of a large enterprise, these tools can help you gain insights, improve efficiency, and achieve your goals.
So why wait? Start exploring data visualisation tools today and see how they can benefit your business.
Content Summary
- One powerful tool that you may not be using to its full potential is data visualisation.
- Data visualisation is the process of representing data graphically, allowing you to quickly and easily analyse complex information.
- In this article, we will explore the many benefits of data visualisation, and show you how it can help you to improve your marketing efforts.
- Any business intelligence (BI) and analytics system should prioritise the visualisation of data as one of its most critical skills.
- Tableau, Yellowfin, and Microsoft Power BI are the three most effective technologies currently available for data visualisation.
- According to Wolf, the ability to see is hardwired into the human brain, however, the ability to read does not come naturally.
- She uses the same terminology that computer scientists would use to describe the brain, referring to it as having an "open architecture."
- She says that the brain's system "is adaptable enough to alter — or reorganise — to fit the changing demands on it."
- By taking into account how important data visualisation is in the sales process, Wolf's findings are quite noteworthy.
- This will allow you to make the data.
- The most effective data visualisation technologies, such as Yellowfin and Power BI, make trend analysis simple and straightforward.
- While conducting trend analysis, you have a variety of different graphical options to choose from.
- Data visualisation is a technique that analysts frequently refer to as a tool for bringing order out of chaos.
- As a result of this, one of the most important aspects of operating a successful company is ensuring that the whole team has access to high-quality data visualisations in a timely way.
- When it comes to communicating the performance of people, departments, and entire organisations, these KPI reports mainly rely on data visualisation technologies.
- Using data visualisation as part of your reporting efforts (and adhering to best practices) will encourage your users to explore and manipulate data in order to uncover important factors using the aforementioned tools, which will help foster a data-driven culture as opposed to the traditional, intuition-based approach to decision-making.
- The accuracy of the results obtained using powerful data visualisation solutions, such as Yellowfin BI and Power BI, may be improved over time through the support and integration of such technologies into the visualisation tools provided by these solutions (via auto-generated comparisons, explanations, alerts and more).Moreover, Yellowfin provides support for yet another essential analytics tool known as Natural Language Query (NLQ).
- As a direct consequence of this, you will obtain additional measures that can be put into practice from the datasets.
- Insight Into Hidden Patterns and Deeper Trends Discovering previously unknown patterns is made easier by using data visualisation tools.
- They assist you in discovering patterns and links among complicated datasets that are not immediately evident without their assistance.
- Because these tools make use of cutting-edge technology to uncover previously undiscovered patterns.
- According to findings published by experts at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the human retina is capable of transmitting data at a rate of around 10 million bits per second.
- The notion of how rapidly our brains can detect pictures and make sense of them is at the heart of data visualisation.
- Data visualisation and the use of online technologies that facilitate data visualisation assist make it easier to grasp the information that is provided rapidly.
- The ability to graphically exhibit data and derive insights from that data is the goal of the online data visualisation tool.
- The ability to immediately get a feel for the temperature of the business is extremely valuable to everyone in the company, from salesmen to CEOs.
- It is to derive meaning from the data and make use of the information for the advantage of the organisation.
- Data Visualization Has a Creditable Impact on Businesses But big data is rapidly becoming ubiquitous across sectors.
- Conclusion In conclusion, data visualisation tools are essential for businesses of all sizes.
- By incorporating data visualisation tools into their business strategy, businesses can gain a significant edge in the market.
- If you haven't already, now is the time to consider incorporating data visualisation tools into your business strategy.
- Start exploring data visualisation tools today and see how they can benefit your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Data visualisation tools make it quick and easy to create charts and graphs, which can be added to a customisable dashboard.; Besides looking beautiful, data visualisation tools give us the ability to process information faster and to use that information to boost productivity and results.
Accurate: The visualisation should accurately represent the data and its trends. Clear: Your visualisation should be easy to understand. Empowering: The reader should know what action to take after viewing your visualisation. Succinct: Your message shouldn't take long to resonate.
Mentally visualising an action or body part may enhance that particular activity or muscle group, according to many studies published on the topic. Mental exercises and imagery not only strengthen your cognition and learning, but it can also help to recover muscle strength lost by injury or stroke.
Here are some elements of good data visualisation that can help you present information that readers can process quickly and easily.
- Clear Headings and Keys.
- Obvious Trends.
- Simple Analysis.
- Relevant Comparisons.
- Lots of Data/Evidence.
- Summaries of Key Points.
- Add design elements.
- Consolidated Information.
There are three critical skills for working with a dataset before it can be used to create a visualisation: Understanding how to manage databases, learning how to use data visualization software, and knowing how different audiences may use the data.