13 Tips & Techniques to use when Visualizing Data

“By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes. A sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.” – David McCandless

Did you know? 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.

Concerning professional growth, development, and evolution, using data-driven insights to formulate actionable strategies and implement valuable initiatives is essential. Digital data not only provides astute insights into critical elements of your business but if presented in an inspiring, digestible, and logical format, it can tell a tale that everyone within the organization can get behind.

Data visualization methods refer to the creation of graphical representations of information. Visualization plays an important part in data analytics and helps interpret big data in a real-time structure by utilizing complex sets of numerical or factual figures.

With the seemingly infinite streams of data readily available to today's businesses across industries, the challenge lies in data interpretation, which is the most valuable insight into the individual organization as well as its aims, goals, and long-term objectives.

That's where data visualization comes in.

Due to the way the human brain processes information, presenting insights in charts or graphs to visualize significant amounts of complex data is more accessible than relying on spreadsheets or reports.

Visualizations offer a swift, intuitive, and simpler way of conveying critical concepts universally – and it's possible to experiment with different scenarios by making tiny adjustments.

Recent studies discovered that the use of visualizations in data analytics could shorten business meetings by 24%. Moreover, a business intelligence strategy with visualization capabilities boasts a ROI of $13.01 back on every dollar spent.

Therefore, the visualization of data is critical to the sustained success of your business and to help you yield the most possible value from this tried and tested means of analyzing and presenting vital information. To keep putting its value into perspective, let’s start by listing a few of the benefits businesses can reap from efficient visuals. 

Benefits Of Data Visualization Skills & Techniques

As we just mentioned in the introduction, using visuals to boost your analytical strategy can significantly improve your company’s return on investment as well as set it apart from competitors by involving every single employee and team member in the analysis process. This is possible thanks to the user-friendly approach of modern online data analysis tools that allow an average user, without the need for any technical knowledge, to use data in the shape of interactive graphs and charts in their decisions making process. Let’s look at some of the benefits data visualization skills can provide to an organization. 

• Boosts engagement: Generating reports has been a tedious and time-consuming task since businesses and analytics came together. Not only are static reports full of numbers and text quickly outdated, but they are also harder to understand for non-technical users. How can you get your employees to be motivated and work towards company goals when they might not even understand them? Data visualizations put together in intuitive dashboards can make the analysis process more dynamic and understandable while keeping the audience engaged.  

• Makes data accessible: Following up on the accessibility point, imagine you are an employee that has never worked with data before, trying to extract relevant conclusions from a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet can become an unbearable task. Data visualizations relieve them from that burden by providing easy access to relevant performance insights. By looking at well-made graphs and charts, employees can find improvement opportunities in real-time and apply them to their strategies. For instance, your marketing team can monitor the development of their campaigns and easily understand at a glance if something is not going as expected or if they exceeded their initial expectations. 

• They save time: No matter the business size, it is very likely that you are working with raw data coming from various sources. Working with this raw data as it is can present many challenges, one of them being the amount of time that it takes to analyze and extract conclusions from it. A time that could be spent on other important organizational or operational tasks. With the right data visualization tools and techniques, this is not an issue, as you can quickly visualize important performance indicators in stunning charts within seconds.  Like this, you can build a complete story, find relationships, make comparisons, and navigate through the data to find hidden insights that might otherwise remain untapped. 

13 Tips & Techniques to use when Visualizing Data

Now that you have a better understanding of how visuals can boost your relationship with data, it is time to go through our top techniques, methods, and skills needed to extract the maximum value out of this analytical practice. Here are 13 essential data visualization techniques you should know.

1. Know Your Audience

This is one of the most overlooked yet vital concepts around.

In the grand scheme of things, the World Wide Web and Information Technology as a concept are in their infancy - and data visualization is an even younger branch of digital evolution.

That said, some of the most accomplished entrepreneurs and executives find it difficult to digest more than a pie chart, bar chart, or a neatly presented visual, nor do they have the time to delve deep into data. Therefore, ensuring that your content is both inspiring and tailored to your audience is one of the most essential data visualization techniques imaginable.

Some stakeholders within your organization or clients and partners will be happy with a simple pie chart, but others will be looking to you to delve deeper into the insights you’ve gathered. For maximum impact and success, you should always conduct research about those you’re presenting to prior to a meeting, and collate your report to ensure your visuals and level of detail meet their needs exactly.

2. Set Your Goals

Like any business-based pursuit, from brand storytelling right through to digital selling and beyond - with the visualization of your data, your efforts are only as effective as the strategy behind them.

To structure your visualization efforts, create a logical narrative and drill down into the insights that matter the most. It’s important to set a clear-cut set of aims, objectives, and goals prior to building your management reports, graphs, charts, and additional visuals.

By establishing your aims for a specific campaign or pursuit, you should sit down in a collaborative environment with others invested in the project and establish your ultimate aims in addition to the kind of data that will help you achieve them.

One of the most effective ways to guide your efforts is by using a predetermined set of relevant KPIs for your project, campaigns, or ongoing commercial efforts and using these insights to craft your visualizations.

3. Choose The Right Chart Type

One of the most effective data visualization methods on our list; is to succeed in presenting your data effectively, you must select the right charts for your specific project, audience, and purpose.

For instance, if you are demonstrating a change over a set of time periods with more than a small handful of insights, a line graph is an effective means of visualization. Moreover, lines make it simple to plot multiple series together.

Dashboarding: advice for useful design and application

Since 1770 when Britain’s James Hargreaves patented his spinning jenny that allowed a single spinster to run eight spindles and produce eight times as much raw thread and yarn as before – cutting both time to market and labor expense involved with producing textiles in Blackburn, Lancashire – doing more with less has been the driving force behind growing a business.

This productivity remains an elemental economic force – with a decisive effect on profit.

In our modern economy, software applications measure linear-feet equivalents of today’s “thread and yarn.” Such raw, furnished data, unlike cotton or wool fibers, begs translation, comparison, and analysis. Consequently, every team lead needs an agent by which to see, interpret and act on that data.

The Dashboard – 3 Types for Business

And that’s what dashboards – imperative to business intelligence software – do. Of course, dicing and splicing that data constitutes a need for tailored dashboards, of which three types are recognized:

• Strategic – aggregates critical, overarching metrics, presenting a 10,000-foot view of a business.
• Analytic – gathers and compares particular metrics across time and many variables, drilling down to actionable data per team.
• Operational – monitors data in real time, alerting a team to any issues that need to be addressed.

Regardless of a dashboard’s purpose, it should reflect a company’s particular needs and culture, displaying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on a firm’s high-level (and/or low-level) objectives. These KPIs will stand as quantifiable measurements of each goal; metrics, by any other definition.

That’s important, because according to Sruthi Varanasi of ReportGarden, “A metric is a quantifiable measure that is used to track and assess the status of a specific business process.”

Metrics – Lifeblood for a business; Heart of a Dashboard

Suffice to say, metrics are the truest barometer of how your online business is doing.

Consider this: A 15 percent increase in conversions is just that, a successful trend. Subsequently, metrics serve as buoys that can keep your business sailing in deep water or warn you when shoals are near. A 21 percent dip in visibility over a month is just that, a falling trend, indicating you might need to revisit strategy and adjust – on the fly.

It stands to reason, then, that constructing a clean, uncluttered, incisive dashboard that represents key business intelligence metrics is equal parts science and art.

You want a dashboard whose widgets illustrate – at a glance – essential data from which sound business decisions can be made – whether those decisions concern the content of a webpage or the features of an actual product.

Dashboard enABLEd! How to Determine Which Metrics to Track

So, how do you decide which specific metrics should populate that dashboard from which you will extract actionable data? How do you identify those KPIs for each business goal? Following these four steps will enABLE you (apology for the acronym within the acronym) to populate your dashboard with meaningful data:

1. Apply S.M.A.R.T. methodology.
2. Bring the selection to the team.
3. Limit KPI assignment to three primary, overriding goals.
4. Eliminate the urge to add more metrics to the dashboard.

1. Apply S.M.A.R.T. to each KPI

For a basic example, if an overriding goal is to increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the questions to ask – and answer (more than yes/no) – to assess the validity of a KPI begin with:

• Is a metric Specific to a goal? What needs to be accomplished and why?
  We want to increase MRR to increase margins and subsidize a new product launch next year.
• Is it Measurable? What kind of historical change has been evident? How will we know the goal was reached?
  According to historical analytics, we can feel confident that an MRR increase of between 3 – 5 % would be achievable.
• Is it Attainable? Are the resources readily available to achieve success? Is the goal reasonable? Is it likely to bring success?
  We can ramp up social media promotion, launch a campaign, or otherwise put effort behind ramping up sales to drive revenue.
• Is it Relevant? How meaningful and worthwhile is the goal? In the current situation can we commit to its achievement?
  Our competition has lost revenue, so more of the market is available to us. The more revenue generated, the more reward for us.
• Is it Timely? Is the goal ahead of the curve, or behind? What’s the deadline for achieving it? What’s the overall timeline set for adopting the goal?
  After strategic planning, we can achieve a substantive bump in MRR over the subsequent quarter.

So, your team devises this KPI: Increase MRR by 3% during Q2. What metric goes on the Dashboard? A monthly monitor of incoming revenue.

2. Bring KPI selection process to the team

Gain consensus on those metrics paramount to the team’s and the company’s success. Asking for a collective viewpoint not only helps distill the essence of paramount KPIs but also builds morale. Each team member gets some skin in the game.

3. Limit KPI assignation to no more than three primary goals

Segment’s Analytics Academy declares the purpose behind each solitary metric populating your dashboard should focus attention on a specific business process (goal!) that needs to be optimized. Using the sample KPI above, it could be one of three under an overarching goal to drive an increase of MRR.

4. Eliminate unnecessary metrics

The rule of thumb is to have no more than seven metrics displayed on any single dashboard because, after all, it functions as a quick-glance representation of a goal’s status. Thus, its design should advance easy comprehension, simple updating, and clean navigation without secondary data distractions.

Your team should make hard decisions on which metrics to include. Consider: secondary data get in the way, conflating interpretation, overwhelming the reviewer. Fewer metrics are better metrics.

Each time you visit the dashboard, you should remember that KPIs keep your business strategy agile, fleet, responsive. Positive data dictates stability and steadiness. Negative data compels your team to adjust, adapt and provide alternatives.

An effective dashboard illustrates this crucial data and discloses a course of action to take.

Metrics on Dashboard: What Are My Choices?

Once you’ve followed the ABLE steps to determine your KPIs, you’re ready to populate your dashboard. At this point, you may ask, “What are metrics that achieve near-universal adoption by businesses?”

That depends on the purpose behind your team, the audience (your team? An executive?) that will be reviewing the dashboard, the “actionability” of the selected KPIs, and the type of visuals preferred.

Metrics for a marketing team might include tracking web traffic sources, incremental sales, social sentiment, conversion rate, and SEO keyword ranking. A sales team might want to monitor sales growth, product performance, average purchase value, and average profit margin.

A financial team can follow working capital, debt-to-equity ratio, and current ratio. An e-commerce team might monitor customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention rate, customer churn analysis, and monthly recurring revenue.

Other salient KPIs can address net profit, revenue growth rate, project schedule variance (PSV), and average revenue per customer. Because your KPI choices are ultimately subjective, the A.B.L.E. methodology can help your team judiciously arrive at which data would be most constructive to track and display.

Vital Metrics on (Dash)Board: The Skinny

As long as any KPI on your dashboard is based in company goals, is relevant to the team behind achieving that goal, is attainable, measurable and remains timely, the dashboard itself should render keen data from which you can take incisive action to engineer successes — as well as avert disasters.

Taking the time to apply the SMART methodology, bring in the team, limit primary goals and amount of KPIs assigned to each, and eliminate the urge to overpopulate a dashboard with secondary data, will help you select the most meaningful metrics for your business onto your dashboard.

Perform these steps. Pick your metrics. Build your dashboard. Mine your data.

Grow your business.

Author: Keith Craig

Source: Sisense

The Advantages of (interactive) Data Visualization

Humans are visual creatures. A visual is processed 60,000 times faster than any form of text, and studies show that 65% of the population is composed of visual learners. Moreover, 90% of the information transferred to the brain is visual.

Marrying digestible text with striking visuals provides the greatest results regarding the effective presentation of data, which in turn makes it easy for audiences to understand and retain data. This very notion is the core of visualization.

In recent times, data visualization specialists have married information to high aesthetics, taking advantage of humans’ natural affinity for beauty. When we are choosing the right data visualization type, the most important element to consider is if you’re offering people the opportunity to see insights they haven’t seen or experienced before and wouldn’t otherwise be able to decipher in written text alone.

Creators of effective visuals understand our human predisposition for the visual, taking it a step further by adding interactive functionalities that capture the imagination while presenting critical insights in a way that is as inspiring as it is understandable. By scrolling, clicking, and moving the cursor over interesting data points, designers engage users on a deeper level and enable them to be a participant rather than a viewer alone, adding more meaning to the data discovery learning process as a result.

Studies suggest that those who follow directions with illustrations perform 323% more efficiently than those who follow text-only directions. To demonstrate, here we place the spotlight on 24 of the best data visualization examples from around the globe. Whether static or interactive dashboards, these creative data visualization samples will serve as an inspiration for any data enthusiast. 

The Benefits Of Data Visualization

Before we delve any deeper, we’re going to look at the primary benefits of taking an active:

• Quicker action: As mentioned, the human brain processes visual information faster than text-based one, which means that your stakeholders – internally – or your prospects – externally – will be able to digest fresh insights and take swift, positive action on them.
• Finding connections: By displaying data in an inspiring visual format, it will be far easier to spot correlations and find connections between your operations and your overall commercial performance. As a result, you can develop a management report that will enable you to gain the insights you need to make changes that have a positive impact on the business.
• Emerging trends: By curating your data dashboards and presenting them visually, you stand a greater chance of spotting the kind of market trends that you can use to evolve your efforts while boosting profitability and gaining an edge over your competitors.
• Fresh discussions: One of the most beneficial elements of using visuals is the fact that it allows you to tell a story with your insights and, as a result, drill down deeper into specific segments of data. By utilizing your own dashboard storytelling efforts, you will be able to spot fresh insights and spark new discussions based on the growth, development, and direction of your business. Moreover, with the use of inspirational, informational graphics, you’ll engage your target audience on a deeper level, encouraging the kind of online discussions that will boost brand awareness, expand your reach, and help you position yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Data Visualization Today: Why It Matters

Good visualizations are particularly important in business, where large volumes of data must be analyzed swiftly or presented in a clear and actionable format. The rows of numbers alone won’t create a story compelling enough to catch the audience’s attention. The goal is always to make the data behind your arguments look attractive enough to persuade decision-makers or enlighten your team members. With easy-to-use interactive data visualization software more and more companies can create eye-catching visualizations on their own. Interactive interfaces make it possible even for non-technical users to create actionable charts.

The type of visualization you select is guided by the kind of information you are seeking to convey. A fixed image is ideal when alternate views are neither needed nor desired, and when publishing to a static medium, such as print. Dynamic, interactive visualizations are better for empowering people to explore the data for themselves. Both have their advantages. When creating one, the purpose should always be to generate a certain level of excitement and engagement with the audience, for it to be the best visualization.

Interactive Data Visualization: What’s In It For Me?

Combine Time and Motion to Aid Audience Understanding

A layer of interactivity enables your audience to connect directly with your data and offers a second axis to track information changing over time. Hans Rosling, a famous data scientist, and visualization Ted Talker is a huge proponent of showing the time as a graphic movement. Check out this video – The Joy of Stats – a perfect example of how combining time with your visualization enables the viewer to see trends.

Drilling Down to Extract Meaning From Numbers

A trend we are seeing in all content marketing, not just visualization, is personal attention. Content is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution from customized white papers to interactive ebooks. Interactive visualization enables you to reach your audience on different levels by offering an ability to drill down into the data. Newcomers to the topic can still spot trends and learn the basics, while experts in the field can drill down deeper into the data for more insight.

Engage, Engage, Engage

Content marketing is competitive. There is a lot of noise to push through before you can be heard. The best interactive data visualization is a ticket into the spotlight. Let’s take, for example, USA Today’s interactive story “Behind The Bloodshed.” Mass killings dominate the American media. How can you compete with major prime channels as a newspaper? The USA upped the ante with this piece, particularly the interactive data visualization that enables the viewer to drill down on the mass killing timeline for details. The piece is informative, powerful, and emotional.

Our selection of the best visualization examples above demonstrates creative, innovative leaps that illustrate the changing way we see and interpret data.

Everything is becoming personalized. People want to see how they fit into the big picture, and where they stand on the shifting terrain. A real-time visualization example or some of the best interactive visualizations answer that need in two ways: giving the viewers control over what they see, and letting them narrow the data down to their personal situation, whether it is age, location, income, or other factors.

This is the beginning of a new phase of data personalization. In place of abstract headlines and generic pronouncements, readers will be able to project themselves into the dataset. With the right tools, you can prepare the best interactive data visualizations for your business on your own, within a few clicks, and with no advanced IT skills needed.

Author: Bernardita Calzon

Source: Datapine

Understanding Power BI Embedded in Azure for Interactive Data Reporting and Analysis

Introduction to Power BI

Power BI data-driven decision-making (DDDM) is being used in a variety of business sectors as a direct result of recent expansions and developments in existing information technology. It is a strategy that guarantees choices made inside a firm are not only based on personal views or an inclination but rather is supported by concrete evidence derived from a variety of sources.

You may get a better understanding of your data with the use of this refined tool Power BI development. It is possible to utilize it to generate reports, dashboards, and graphs that can then be included in the Azure websites and apps you have. This is an excellent method for making judgments and insights that are driven by data easily accessible to your consumers. The use of data obtained from a variety of sources necessitates the collection of data, the computation of data, and the image processing of data to supply decision-makers with all of the necessary analytics. This enables decision-makers to have the best possible understanding of what the subsequent step in their business should be. Businesses that adopt a data-driven culture using Power BI Azure see a fourfold increase in their revenue performance and a significant improvement in their customers’ levels of satisfaction.

Azure on the other hand is a firm that focuses on applications and cloud computing as its primary areas of expertise. They provide services and products that are ground-breaking, advanced, and user-friendly all at the same time. 

What is meant by the term “Power BI Embedded”?

To begin, Power BI Embedded is the service provided by Microsoft Azure which allows programmers to incorporate or embed Power BI dashboards and reports into its apps (Websites, Portals, CRMs, etc). Because it is free, simple to set up, and comes with a large number of capabilities already built in, Power BI Embedded has become one of the most popular solutions for sharing data with other applications. It is possible to use it as a laptop, to incorporate reports, a tablet, or even a desktop computer. These are only some of the numerous uses that are possible. People who operate on the move or who want a gadget that can be used in a variety of contexts will find it to be an ideal solution.

In addition to this, it keeps the great functionality and features of visual analysis that it originally had.

This online analytical tool Power BI Embedded in Azure offers a solution to the difficult data challenges that you encounter regularly in the course of your job. Power BI Embedded in Azure is an excellent tool for gathering and analyzing data, and it can be used by organizations of all sizes, including those in the public sector and private industry. Power BI Embedded in Azure is compatible with a wide number of data sources, including SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Analysis Services.

Deploying Power BI Embedded in Azure

It is now much simpler to design, deploy, and manage embedded services when you make use of Azure’s newest capability, which is known as Power BI Embedded.

ISVs and app programmers now can expose Power BI data inside their apps thanks to a new service offered by Azure called Power BI Embedded. Users of the software developed by the ISV or app development may benefit from end-to-end experiences that are made possible by this service. This entails providing consumers with a comprehensive analytics experience, as well as data-driven insights and the capacity to build interactive visualizations for user consumption.

How to utilize the embedded version of Power BI?

1. Embedded Power BI for your Company or Organization (Internal)

To incorporate dashboards and reports, the Power BI REST API services are used. You can examine data and dashboards from a variety of different sources inside a single location thanks to the Power BI Embedded solution. In addition, you may utilize Power BI Embedded for your Organization to access all of your organization’s reporting, analysis, and dashboards inside an app that is designed for usage on a variety of devices. Your company will have the ability to better display its data and improve its decision-making with the assistance of Power BI Embedded for your Organization (Internal), a solution that is both powerful and versatile.

2. Embedded Power BI for your Company’s Customers (External)

It is possible to get information that is current with the help of Power BI Embedded for your Customers (External), which is an excellent method. Power BI Embedded gives you access to the information you want, whether you are looking for a new marketing plan or attempting to locate your high-value consumers. People can design and distribute apps to users outside of their organization, such as clients and partners, using Power BI.

The Premium edition of Power BI Embedded in Azure incorporates all of the features that are available in the Basic version as well as additional ones.

1. You can do the following with Power BI Embedded on Azure:
2. Explore and analyze your data with cutting-edge graphics.
3. Develop your hypotheses and projections.
4. Gain new perspectives by analyzing data that may or may not be stored in a data warehouse.

What is the Licensing for the embedded version of Microsoft Power BI?

You can get the ability to gather data from a variety of resources and license the program for your microcontrollers thanks to the newly introduced licensing alternative for Power BI Embedded.

Access tokens are generated by Power BI Embedded with the help of Azure Active Directory. Once you get the access token, integrating or embedding the reports into your app will be straightforward. The following procedures are included in Power BI Embedded:

1. Initiate the creation of a workspace inside the Power BI online service.
2. Insert your records into the workplace you generated in the initial phase of the process.
3. Integrate an application with the domain controller of Azure (To get the Access token from the Azure Active directory).
4. Integrating the report will need that authorization to be granted.
5. After this, you can use utilize the Dot Net SDK or the REST API to integrate the report. Both of these options are available to you.

In addition, you will get the report ID, as well as an entry token, an embed token, and an Embedurl. When you embed a Power BI report in your application, you have a choice of options available to you for using that report. You are free to construct your reports and visualizations based on the data that it provides. It also allows you to engage with your data in a more meaningful manner, which is another purpose for it.

Bottom Line

The proficiency of Power BI Embedded in Azure to facilitate the sharing of interactive reports with various stakeholders in your business is among the most significant advantages offered by this product. If you are working with a remote client, using this service can help you save a significant amount of time.

Author: Daniel Jacob

Source: Datafloq