The top five advantages of data visualization

Big files with numbers are usually hard to read and make it difficult to spot patterns easily. However, many organizations believe that developing visual reports focused on creating stories around data is unnecessary; they think that the data alone should be sufficient for decision-making. Visualizing supports this and lightens the decision-making process.

Luckily, there are ways and programs that help to visualize all the data your company has into dashboards, graphs and reports. Data visualization helps transform your numbers into an engaging story with details and patterns. In this article, you will learn the advantages of data visualization.

Easy to understand

Thanks to graphic representations, we can interpret vast quantities of data in a clear and cohesive way, which in turn allows us to understand the data and to draw conclusions and see perspectives.

Using data visualization, managers and decision-makers can easily create and rapidly consume important metrics. If any of these metrics have anomalies — ie. Sales are significantly down in one region — decision makers will easily dig into the data to find out what operating circumstances or decisions are at stake and how they respond to the factors encountered.

Spot patterns

Data visualization enables us to recognize emerging trends and respond rapidly on the grounds of what we see. Such patterns make more sense when graphically represented; because visuals and diagrams make it easier for us to identify strongly correlated parameters. Certain relations are obvious, but others need to be recognized and clarified to help us concentrate on a particular data point which can have an effect on business.

Story telling is more engaging

Tableau is one of the leaders in helping you visualize your data. You can build dashboards and turn them into stories. The reason why this program is so successful is because storytelling is a model which enables us to easily create a narrative through graphics and diagrams through which, with the help of visual analytics, we can discover new insights and engage others. Conveying the message in a story is much more engaging and easier to understand for your employees. 

Speed up the decision-making process

Humans can process visual images 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, seeing a graph, chart, or other visual representation of data is more comfortable for the brain to process, than for it to read and comprehend text, and then convert this into a mental visualization (that likely will not be entirely accurate) of the data. 

Thanks to our ability to easily interpret visual data , data visualization can dramatically improve the speed of decision-making processes. According to the Wharton School of Business, data visualization can shorten business meetings by up to 24 percent. 

Not just a simple pie chart

Today, we can move away from a bar graph or a pie chart, although they can still be useful at times. However, with current and more advanced data visualization capabilities, users can also make more advanced visualizations possible. For example, a simple way to visualize any random data is to configure it in a bubble graph or a heat map. For more sophisticated research, you can choose displays such as frame diagrams (for hierarchical presentations) or Gantt charts (for project management). 

These more advanced visualizations show that for any type of data set there is a good way to transform it into an easy-to-understand image.

Conclusion

Data visualisation allows sales representatives, marketing teams, and business executives to easily detect patterns in large volumes of disorganised data. By using visual data discovery tools, organizations can effectively keep track of not just sales performance, but team and personnel performances, business conditions, and marketing trends as well.

Are you ready to take your business to the next level?