Why is data visualization important for business?
A well-known proverb, ‘A picture is worth thousand words’ is well suitable for the Data Visualizations as it can visualize the thousands of data records in the single chart which told us the story on-behalf of the larger amount of data. But why we find visualizations easy to understand than data records? Here are some facts:
- 90% of the information is processed by the human brain is visuals.
- Only 13 milliseconds are enough for human brain to process an image or a visual.
- Human brain processes images/visuals 60000 times faster than text information
- 80% of people remember what they see vs only 20% of people remember what the read or a piece of the information.
Let’s take an example:
Average speed of reading is 200 to 250 words a minute, and below paragraph has 116 words approximately. So, it would take 30 to 40 seconds to read and probably 5 mins to comprehend it with facts and figures.
Let’s Measure the time taken to read the following paragraph and to comprehend the thoughts vs time taken to understand the visualization shown below the paragraph:
Paragraph for reading:
“We are in the final month and week of current year and wanted to review our current year performance.
We had a slow start with our sales numbers this year. Due to countrywide lockdown our sales for the month March, April and May hit very badly but, extra efforts taken by our sales team took us back on track and fortunately we are closing our year on a good note by achieving 38.45% overall business growth along with the addition of 10 new customers worth USD 3 million.
Many congratulations to Patrica, Josepth, Jessica, John and James for being the top 5 sales performers who are representing Huston, New York, Chicago, San Jose and Dallas respectively.”
Data Visualization of the above paragraph:
If you give second thought on time taken to read and comprehend the information (text) is more than understanding the visualization. Also, visualization is providing us the additional information which is helping to make decisions and understanding the larger data and get snapshot of it.
The raw text or information is usually very difficult to understand and one might derive different interpretations ignoring some key points. Hence it might be multiple reading of text or information to make solid decisions and derive business insights.
Data visualization platforms provide an opportunity to present the data in visually appealing formats to provide meaning to the data through infographics. The pictorial or graphical representation of the data helps decision-makers to grasp the data context and to observe changing trends and patterns from the data.
Importance of data visualization
1. Better data analysis
Visual data analysis helps businesses to understand the business better, keep track of business operations and the problem areas. It helps them to make better business decisions and makes the stakeholders focus on areas that require better attention.
2. Faster decision-making
Humans can process visuals faster than raw, tabular data. Presenting data as visuals helps to speed up the analysis which helps stakeholders make a decision faster, accelerating business growth.
3. Simplifying complex data
Analyzing a vast amount of data is difficult and time-consuming. It also increases the risk of errors. Data visualization simplifies data, helps users to identify trends and progress in their business and market.
4. Understanding correlations
Data visualization helps to correlate between various independent variables, thus helping users to understand the trend and make better decisions
5. Analyzing risk and value
Risk analysis is difficult when using common spreadsheets. Too many variables need to be considered before analyzing the risks and value of a product in the market. Data visualizations help to factor in multiple variables and the results can be color-coded to easily visualize the risk and make decisions accordingly.
Purpose of Data Visualization
The primary purpose of Data Visualization is to create a sense out of the data and help organizations make better decisions.
- The messaging’s impact for audiences gets strengthened with Data visualization as it helps in presenting the data analysis results in a very persuasive manner. Data visualization unifies the messaging systems across all the groups and fields within the organization.
- Visualization lets you understand and comprehend vast amounts of raw data at a glance and in a much better way. It eases the reader/viewer with easy-to-understand representation of the data to help in measuring its impact on the business and further communicate the insights visually to internal and external audiences.
- Decisions can’t be made without data, data and insights enable and support the decision-makers in decision analysis. Unbiased data without errors and inaccuracies allows the decision-makers to further access the right kind of visualization to represent the data.
Benefits of Data Visualization Tools
Incorporating data visualization in businesses, decision-makers can get transformative benefits in their core operational processes. Data visualization tools have the capacity to transform any business.
- Increases the speed of decision-making processes
- Identifies inaccuracies and errors in data quickly
- Assist in real-time information processing
- Promotes story-telling and conveys the right messages to the right audiences
- Analyzes business insights and help businesses to assess their growth, progress, and goals without any bias
- Helps to discover the latest trends and helps businesses to stay on top of their game.
- Optimizes data visualization and helps to retrieve real-time reports
How Intellify helps businesses
Intellify– a Microsoft partner provide customized solutions for businesses to perform data analysis and visualization to achieve their goals. Intellify have a team of Data Management Experts who help businesses transform into sustainable and profitable organizations. With ready-to-use accelerators built from multiple domains and industries, we help businesses to generate actionable insights anytime, anywhere.