Impactful Data Visualization: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Your organization can benefit from analytics regardless of business type. You can increase the benefits by making your analytics information easily accessible and understandable to all. You don’t need to teach your entire organization statistics and statistical analysis for the business to benefit from analytics. You can set up the back-end of your data ecosystem to do all the hard work and present the information on an easy-to-read, simple-to-understand dashboard that presents the information in digestible chunks.

What is a data visualization dashboard?

A data visualization dashboard presents all relevant analytics information in graphical format. This tool tracks and analyzes data, then displays it in the format assigned by the designer, according to prioritized KPIs and metrics. The dashboard provides non-technical users with the same access to understandable data for better-informed decision-making.

Benefits of Data Dashboards

While every department can find utility in a data visualization dashboard, the sales, marketing, engineering, and executive departments of a business will probably benefit the most. Because the dashboard organizes data by key performance indicators (KPIs) and digests the information for the user, displaying it in a friendly, easy-to-understand format, it helps the company’s departments collaborate. Users can view information about more than one KPI at once plus more easily understand complex data and how one thing influences another. More accessible information and the ability to create custom reports when needed provides a stepping stone to innovations.

Designing a Data Dashboard

You design this dashboard according to your business’s needs. Use the following five design guidelines in developing it:

1. Design for your audience. The more straightforward you make the dashboard, the better. If your audience works with stats every day and needs to create custom reports, you provide this option. If your audience needs essential KPIs and sales numbers, you use the simplest display possible for these to provide an at-a-glance dashboard.

2. Base the dashboard on company or project goals. Each graph, chart, etc., should address a milestone. This makes it simple to determine goal progress. Each project gets its own dashboard. Overall, company progress gets its own dashboard. Forget about trying to cram everything onto one dashboard. That defeats the purpose of the dashboard.

3. Only devote space to relevant KPIs for your business. Your dashboard ideally uses only one screen. That means the full dashboard loads within one normal computer screen. Your dashboard, like a website, should immediately scale according to the device used, so you need a mobile-friendly version.

4. Plan your dashboard visuals for maximum storytelling efficiency. The most statistically challenged person with no analytics training should be able to look at the dashboard and understand its charts and graphs in a moment—these takeaways from the whole point of the dashboard.

5. Provide context for your information. You can make each chart or graphic clickable or create a hover box, so when a reader mouses over the chart, the context box opens to explain the numbers in simple, digestible words that a high schooler could understand.

Let Starr & Associates Help You

At Starr & Associates, we already have the design knowledge and experience to create understandable data visualization dashboards that display KPIs and major metrics, so employees outside of your analytics expert can understand them. Contact us today to get started using these custom dashboards to infuse your business knowledge and make better-informed business decisions.