Presentation and Visualization Methods

Today with the amount of data that is being stored and processed in databases, an effective way of presenting and visualizing data has become equally important. This is necessary to extract meaningful information from the data that we store. Most business intelligence tools today provide features that can be used by  business owners to create useful metrics, reports and dashboards. This enables executives to see analytics presented visually, so that they can grasp useful insights and identify new patterns. For the purpose of this blog, I would like to use the following three vignettes to demonstrate some of the types of visualization that are commonly used. The three industry that I have selected are:

• Transportation
• E-commerce
• Financial Service

Transportation:

Transportation industry data provides some interesting opportunity for great data visualizations which numbers alone cannot represent. Take the example of the following visualization made by a Kansas City-based performance consultancy company called BUCS Analytics. They used Spotfire to create the following visualization:

Image Credits: data-informed.com

The following graph is called as scatter plot. This type of graph is useful when there are large number of data points to be represented over a measure such as distance. The graph shown in this image compares the cost structure of owning trucks versus buying that capacity by distance. The visualization of the data enabled the company’s management to see that greater profit margins was possible on routes run by trucks they owned when the distance was less than 1,500 miles.

E-commerce

E-commerce industry is unique in the fact that unlike brick and mortar stores, business owners of e-commerce cannot observe their customers. Hence it is important to track, analyze, and view customer behavior through different BI tools. Consider the image shown below as a typical dashboard for e-commerce business owner:

Image Credits: hbr.org

This image shows the trend in sales across various dimension such as day of week, crowd size and the activity rate in sales. The dashboard shows both bar graphs as well as line charts which gives a clear representation of the data. It neatly shows the comparison between various attribute values of the dimension that we are interested in tracking. For example the dashboard can be used to track demographic data, customer engagement, enhance customer experience and even make predictive analysis possible.

Financial Services:

Visualization tools can be used to bring transparency & clarity to financial data. Day to day as well as historical transactions organized into interactive visualizations and reports. The image below shows how transactions in financial organizations can be neatly categorized to understand meaningful trends.

Image Credit: finance.strands.com

The visualization shown above is a bubble chart that is commonly used to create colorful and overlapping graphs. A bubble chart is a variation of a scatter chart in which the data points are replaced with bubbles, and an additional dimension of the data is represented in the size of the bubbles. The graph shown above helps users to track income and expenses in a more fun and intuitive manner using stunning data visualizations. The view can also be customized by time period, multiple accounts or category level.

Thus as we see, there are business intelligence tools that provide various type of graphs for effective visualization of data. The information that can be derived from these visualization enables business users to leverage the data that they have in a way that ordinary numbers cannot. Hence presentation and visualization of data becomes an important feature in any BI tool.

Reference:

1. http://data-informed.com/visualizations-from-erp-data-brings-clarity-to-decision-makers/
2. http://data-informed.com/optimize-ecommerce-analytics-visualization/
3. http://finance.strands.com/products/pfm-personal-financial-management/